BEHIND THE SCENES

FRONT VIEW: Here’s the “over-my-shoulder” view where I’m set up directly in front of our subject, with my camera tethered to my laptop, so I’m shooting directly into Lightroom. It’s 14 feet from my shooting position to where our subject is seated (as seen in the side view on the right).

SIDE VIEW: The main light is a large 48" Rapid Box Switch Octa-L positioned up high, aiming down, but it’s way over to the side so that it fully lights the side of his face closest to the flash. Just a little light makes it over to the other side of his face, so the far side of his face falls into shadow, which is the look we’re going for.

BEHIND THE SCENES

SIDE VIEW: This view gives you a good look at how the softbox is just a little bit in front of our subject, and you can also see why the light from it doesn't hit that background—it's almost aiming sideways.

BACK VIEW: Another thing that keeps the light from hitting the background is how far from the background the flash is. It's 7 feet from the background, so that flash, at 1/4 power, isn't going to make it all the way back there. If I was using a gray background here, I could move him a few more feet, so a little light would hit that gray background, and even it would look solid black.

CAMERA SETTINGS

OTHER INFO

BACKGROUND:

The background is solid black Savage Widetone Seamless Background Paper (it’s 9' wide by 36' long—you just roll out as much as you need). I highly recommend going with at least 9' wide for your seamless unless you’re only doing headshots. Otherwise, with a 5' roll, you’ll spend your shoot fighting to not see the edges of your paper on either side. The 5' roll is cheaper, but it’s not worth the headache and the extra time in Photoshop filling in the gaps at the ends.

EDITING/RETOUCHING

When it comes to retouching, guys are easy. Why? Because nobody cares about guys. You balance the exposure, remove any blemishes, sharpen the heck out of them, and you’re done. Well, it’s not always quite that easy (sometimes it’s easier). In this case, we’re going to create a desaturated, contrasty skin look that’s really easy to achieve, and we'll also bop over to Photoshop to get the best look for our subject in this shot.

STEP ONE:

Here’s our original RAW image in Lightroom, and once again, for our first adjustment, we’ll go to the Develop module’s Basic panel (in the right side panels) and change the RAW profile from the default Adobe Color to Adobe Portrait to give us a better starting place for our portrait editing. It’s more subtle in this particular image than it was with the others so far (as seen in the before/after here), but it’s just one click, so still totally worth doing. Reminder: You can only choose the RAW profiles if you took the shot in RAW on your camera.

STEP TWO:

I underexposed the shot a bit when I took it, so let’s go ahead and click the Auto button in the Basic panel just to see what it gives us. But, with a shot that’s supposed to be somewhat dark and dramatic, chances are it will overexpose it, so we go from one problem to another, but click it anyway and let’s see what it does. Yup. It overexposed it (kinda as expected—it set the Exposure at +2.11, so up two full stops). Go ahead and drag the Exposure slider back to the left until it looks about right to you (here, I dragged it to +1.30, along with the Contrast slider to +4, and that looks a lot better, as seen in the After photo). You can see that not only do his red shirt and blue jeans “pop” now, you can see a little detail in the background as well, so we get a little bit of separation.

STEP THREE:

One thing I look for lighting-wise in portraits is “falloff,” meaning the light on the face should be the brightest, and then it should gradually get darker as you move down. You can do this in the studio during the shoot using a flag (a black piece of foam core or fabric) to block the bottom half of the softbox, or you can do it here in Lightroom. Click on the Masking tool (Shift-W; the gray circle with the white dashes around it, in the toolbox beneath the histogram), and in the panel of Masking tools that appears, click on Linear Gradient (M; as shown here, bottom left). Now, scroll down and drag the Exposure slider to the left a bit (here, I dragged it to –0.70, so nearly 3/4 of a stop). Then, click-and-drag the Linear Gradient tool, starting at his stomach and going up to his nose. That leaves his face at the right brightness, but then it gets gradually darker as it moves down.

STEP FOUR:

Another move I do to most portraits is to desaturate the skin a bit. Oftentimes, you can simply desaturate the whole image a bit and it works fine, but in this case, we don't want to lose those bright, vivid colors, so we’re going to need to only affect his skin areas and nothing else. At the top of the Masks panel, click on Create New Mask, and then from the pop-up menu of Masking tools, click on Select People. Now, at the bottom of the panel, click on the round Person thumbnail, then in the Person Mask Options panel, turn on the Face Skin checkbox and his masked face skin areas will appear in a red tint (as seen here).

STEP FIVE:

With the skin on his face masked, we now have to mask his neck, chest, hands, and arms, too—all his visible skin. So, in the Person Mask Options panel, also turn on the Body Skin checkbox, and then click the Create Mask button at the bottom of the panel, so that all his visible skin is masked (as seen here).

STEP SIX:

Now, scroll down to the adjustment sliders and drag the Saturation slider to the left a bit to desaturate his skin without touching the vibrant colors of his clothes (as seen here, in the After photo). I dragged it to –33 here, but of course, how far you drag will depend on the photo. You can’t underdo it; however, you can overdo this desaturation. If you drag too far to the left, the skin starts to look gray. In short, if you make a mistake, make sure it’s that you didn’t desaturate enough, not that you desaturated too much.

STEP SEVEN:

I want to take a quick scroll through the images from this shoot to see if there’s one where he’s got a better expression and possibly a little better position with his head. The funny thing is, when I started scrolling through, the photo right before this one has that, but the way I framed up the shot, I cut part of this fingers off at the bottom of the frame (as seen here). So, I like this expression and head position better, but I like the rest of the original image we’ve been working on better. So, I kind of need a combination of the two: his head position and expression from this shot on the body of the other shot. Sounds like a job for Photoshop, but before we do that, we need to make this photo look just like the other one (it needs to have the exact same edits).

STEP EIGHT:

To do this (get this image looking the same as the one we’ve been editing), we get to use one of my favorite Lightroom features. Here’s how it works: First, down in the Filmstrip along the bottom, click on the photo we’ve been editing. Then, click on the photo that we want to have that same look. Now, all you have to do is click on the Previous button at the bottom of the right side panels (shown circled here) and it applies all the changes we made to the previously selected photo to this photo (and yes, that includes that gradient we used to create the light falloff, and it redoes the AI face and body skin masks to fit his pose in this image automatically). Now both images have the same look, so when we take them over to Photoshop, their tones will be the same.

STEP NINE:

Now, go down to the Filmstrip and Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the original photo we edited to select it, along with the second one with the better expression and head position we just edited. With both of them now selected, press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to open them in Photoshop (as seen here. Since they’re both RAW images, they open right up). Photoshop doesn’t have a filmstrip, so by default, you only see one image window at a time. But, if you look in the top left of the window, you’ll see two tabs with the images’ names. Each of those tabs represents one of the two images open in Photoshop. To switch between them, just click on a tab.

STEP 10:

Time for a “head swap.” Start by clicking on the tab for the second image (the one with “-237” at the end of its filename), then go to Photoshop’s Toolbox, along the left, and click on the Lasso tool (L). Now, click-and-drag out a very loose selection around his head and the area around it (as shown here) to select that area of the image. We don’t want to see a hard edge where we made that selection once we paste this area onto the other photo, so go under the Select menu up top, under Modify, and choose Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, enter a Feather Radius of 10 pixels, and click OK. The edges are now soft and will blend in nicely with the surrounding pixels once it’s pasted into the other image.

STEP 11:

Now, press Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to Copy this selected head and surrounding area into memory. Then, click on the tab for the original image we were working on (the one with “-238” at the end of its filename) and press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to Paste that image from memory into this image. It will appear above this image on its own separate layer, named “Layer 1” (as seen here).

STEP 12:

We now need to position this head over the original one, and I have a great trick for this: lower the Opacity of Layer 1, so you can see through to the Background layer below it. Here, I lowered the Opacity slider to 48%, and now we can see through Layer 1. Now, what I generally use as a guide to match things up are the eyes. Because his head position is a little different, they won’t line up perfectly, but it helps to at least get close. To move this head layer, get the Move tool (press the V key), then click-anddrag the new head over the old one (as shown here). If it looks a little out of focus here, it’s just because you’re seeing both sets of eyes and ears and all that, so just get as close as you can to the same position, knowing it won’t be spot on. Just kind of get in the ballpark at this point.

STEP 13:

In this particular case, the thing that worked even better than the eyes, was lining up his face on the left side of the image. Once I got those two faces lined up, it actually looked pretty good. When it looks about right, raise the Opacity of Layer 1 back up to 100%, and now you’ll really see how the head swap looks. Yes, we still have a little fixing left to do, but it’s pretty minor (and pretty easy to do).

STEP 14:

To clean up any visible edges (like the one we have on his collar here), we’ll add a layer mask and paint that edge away. To do that, click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel (it’s the third icon from the left), and then get the Brush tool (B). Make sure your Foreground color is set to black (at the bottom of the Toolbox; press the X key if it’s not), and then choose a soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker up in the top left of the Options Bar. Now, paint over that visible edge on his collar to help it blend in perfectly (as shown here). That extra area around his head that we selected helps hide the old head, but if you see any visible edge from that area, you can paint it away with the Brush tool, as well. But, you probably won’t see anything because we feathered the edge of that selection earlier, which softened the edges and helped it blend in.

STEP 15:

Now we’re going to do a little facial retouching, and we want to do this on a special layer that looks like we flattened the image, but we didn’t. That way, if we have to undo something we did earlier, that layer will still be there in the layer stack. To create this special layer press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E). Now, look at the top of your layer stack. You’ll see that there’s a new layer, named “Layer 2,” which looks like a flattened version of your image, and we’ll work on this layer from here on out. Next, get the Healing Brush tool from the Toolbox (as shown here, or just press Shift-J until you have it).

STEP 16:

Let’s start with lessening the dark circles under his eyes. Press-andhold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click once in a nearby area of skin (in this case, I clicked just to the lower right of his eye on the left to sample that area). Then, paint a stroke over the dark area under his eye to completely remove it (as shown here). Of course, now he looks like he’s 10 years old, so in the next step, we’re going to bring back some of that dark area, so it looks more realistic.

STEP 17:

Right after we’re done with that Healing Brush stroke, we’ll immediately go to the Edit menu and choose Fade Healing Brush (the reason I say to go "immediately" is that if you do anything else first, this option goes away). Fade is like “undo on a slider,” so dragging its slider to the left undoes that Healing Brush repair, and the farther you drag it to the left, the more of that fix it undoes. We want to drag it to the left to bring back around half of the darkening under his eye, so go ahead and do that (in this case, I dragged it over to 48% and that looks pretty realistic, while reducing the darkening by a little under 50%). Now, click OK to close Fade. Do the same thing to the other eye: remove the darkening with the Healing Brush tool, then Fade the amount of healing. Also, while you have it, you can use the Healing Brush tool to remove any small blemishes, like the one on the tip of his nose.

STEP 18:

Let’s finish off here in Photoshop with some sharpening (yes, we could do our sharpening in Lightroom, but it’s much easier to see the effects of sharpening here in Photoshop, plus we have lots of powerful sharpening options here, too). Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Smart Sharpen to bring up its dialog (seen here). Set the Amount to 300% and the Radius to 2.0. Leave Reduce Noise at 10%, the Remove pop-up menu set to Lens Blur, and click OK to apply some nice snappy sharpening to our image.

STEP 19:

We’re done in Photoshop, so let’s take the image back to Lightroom to add some finishing touches. Remember, you only have to do two things: (1) choose Save from the File menu, or press Command-S (PC: Ctrl-S), and then (2) close the document (you don't have to save the other one; you can just close it). When you go back to Lightroom, your image will be waiting there next to the original. Back in Lightroom, let’s do a quick finishing move or two. Start by clicking on the Masking tool, and in the panel of tools, click on Brush. Then, scroll down to the adjustment sliders and increase the Exposure slider to 0.50, and then paint over his face to make it about a half a stop brighter (as shown here).

STEP 20:

One more minor thing we’ll retouch: Look at the photo back in Step 19, and in particular, look at his thumb on his hand over his shirt. The side of his thumb is brighter than the rest of his hand, so it draws the eye (this is very natural, so you can choose to leave it as-is, or simply darken that side of his thumb a bit, so it doesn’t draw the eye against that red shirt). If you decide to darken it, go to the top of the Masks panel, click Create New Mask, then click on Brush again, and then lower the Exposure slider and the Highlights slider just a bit (don’t go too far, making it as dark as his fingers, or it will look unnatural). Now, just paint over that thumb, and that should do it. Let’s compare the final image to our original image (the one with the slightly different head). On the next page is a before/after.