BEHIND THE SCENES

FRONT VIEW: Here’s the “over-my-shoulder” view where you can see the “triangle of light” that we’re using to light our subject. The two tall strip banks are the main flashes, with one slightly higher powered than the other. We don’t want to eliminate the shadows, but we want to create a nice, even overall look.

SIDE VIEW: The horizontal flash down low, directly in front of her, is designed to fill in the shadows under her chin and in her eye sockets, and help even out the light on her face. It’s powered lower than the two main flashes above because we want to use it just to fill. We don’t want that flash too bright or it will “up-light” our subject, which is very unflattering.

BEHIND THE SCENES

SIDE VIEW: We’re using a white seamless paper background, but if we don’t light it, even though it’s solid white, it will appear as a light gray background in our photos. What’s nice about that is you get double-duty from this one background: Light it with a flash, it’s solid white. Don’t put a light on it, it’s light gray. Move your subject farther away from it, it becomes dark gray.

BACK VIEW: Here’s the view from the back, where you can really see that “triangle of light.”

CAMERA SETTINGS

OTHER INFO

BACKGROUND:

Solid white Savage Widetone Seamless Background Paper (see page 44 for more on this background).

EDITING/RETOUCHING

This is a fairly short and easy retouch, but we'll address some important areas, like darkening the part in your subject’s hair so their scalp doesn’t stand out, and getting in really tight on their eyes to reduce or remove any red eye veins. On 3/4- or full-length shots, you probably wouldn’t take the time to do this because your subject’s eyes are so far away, but in a tight headshot like this, eye veins can really stand out. Luckily, getting rid of them is pretty easy.

STEP ONE:

Here’s our original RAW image in Lightroom’s Develop module, and once again, for our first adjustment, we’ll change the RAW profile from the default Adobe Color to Adobe Portrait (from the Profile pop-up menu, at the top of the Basic panel) to give us a better, flatter starting place for our portrait editing. Now, for this image, it didn’t do much at all (as you can see here), so it’s not a big deal if you skip this step for this image.

STEP TWO:

This is a very brightly lit image and her blouse, being a very light pastel color, is kind of a bit blown out. It’s not clipping—we didn’t clip the highlights—but it’s so bright that it seems to be lacking detail. To have Lightroom automatically expand our tonal range (so the whitest parts of our image are bright, without clipping parts of our image, and our blacks are nice and black, without them turning solid black), just press-and-hold the Shift key, then double-click directly on the word “Whites,” and then on the word “Blacks” in the Basic panel. Here, it took the Whites down to –100, which seemed a little drastic to me, so I dragged them back up to –73, and the detail looks much better in her blouse, and the overall brightness looks a bit more balanced while still keeping a bright-ish look.

STEP THREE:

If I feel the part in my subject’s hair stands out too much, I’ll darken it just a bit, so it doesn’t draw the eye. This is something you would probably never notice while you’re standing there talking to the person, but that can often stand out in photos, so it’s worth fixing. Zoom in on her part (press Command-+ [plus sign; PC: Ctrl-+]), then 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 Brush (K; as shown here).

STEP FOUR:

Now, scroll down to the adjustment sliders and drag the Whites slider way over to the left (I dragged it to –90 here), and then drag the Exposure slider a little to the left, as well (I dragged it to –0.25 here). Then, paint over the part in her hair to darken it (as seen here, in the After image on the right). You’ll have to adjust the Exposure amount depending on the image, but the Whites slider will do most of the work, so you’re just using the Exposure slider to tweak the retouch. Ahhh, that’s better.

STEP FIVE:

It looks like we have some veins showing in her eyes, so let’s zoom in really tight on the eye on the left first and take a good look. Yup, they’re there. Nothing too bad, and we'll be able to easily fix these right here in Lightroom, so let’s get to it.

STEP SIX:

Get the Healing tool (Q) from the toolbox (beneath the histogram), and at the top of the tool's panel, set the Mode to Heal (the middle icon). Make your brush size a little larger than the vein (using the Size slider in the tool’s panel, or by using the Bracket keys on your keyboard), and then paint a brush stroke over it (as shown here) to remove it (well, it’ll try anyway). The second outline you see (the one without the icon) shows where Lightroom sampled from to make that retouch, and in this case, you can see it dipped a little too close to the edge of the eye opening on the bottom left, so the retouch is a little messy, but we can fix that. (Note: You can also use a mask to fix red eye veins, like we did back on page 12, but I just wanted to show you another way to do it here.)

STEP SEVEN:

To get a better retouch, just clickand-drag that second outline (as shown here, where I dragged it up and over just a bit; you get a live preview of the retouch as you drag it, so it’s usually fairly easy to find a clean, nearby spot). When it looks good to you, release your mouse button and the retouch is done. By the way, if you’d like Lightroom to choose a different place to sample from, click the Refresh button at the bottom of the tool's panel (or just press the Forward Slash key on your keyboard) and it will choose a new spot for you. Or, if you'd like to see how it looks using Content-Aware Remove mode (which we looked at back in Chapter 3), just click on its icon at the top of the tool's panel (it's the first icon to the right of Mode).

STEP EIGHT:

We’ve got a few other things we’ll need to address here, like getting rid of the softboxes you can see in the frame, which we could do here in Lightroom, but we also have some retouching tasks, so let’s head over to Photoshop now by pressing Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E; it’s a RAW image, so it opens right up). First, let’s get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) from the Toolbox on the left, and draw out a rectangular selection around the softbox in the topleft corner (as shown here). Then, go under the Edit menu and choose Fill. When its dialog appears, make sure Content-Aware is selected from the Contents pop-up menu up top (as seen here), and then click OK to get rid of that softbox. Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect. Next, let’s work on that larger softbox along the right side.

STEP NINE:

Now, if you make a Rectangular Marquee tool selection large enough to cover that whole softbox on the right, Content-Aware Fill might not have enough open space to work properly. So, we’ll switch tools. Get the Polygonal Lasso tool from the Toolbox (or press Shift-L until you have it), which lets you draw straight-line selections, so you can draw kind of a triangle-shaped selection over that softbox (as seen here). Start by clicking once up near the top left of the softbox (yes, you can extend your selection out into the gray canvas area outside your image—just click-and-drag the bottom corner of your image window to extend it), then move your cursor down to the bottom left of the softbox, and when you click, it draws a straight line between the two points. Now, go along the bottom and click again on the bottom right, then click again at the top right, and then click back where you started, and those straight lines will turn into a selection. You can now go under the Edit menu and choose Fill again, click OK, and that area will be fixed, as well. When you’re done, go ahead and deselect.

STEP 10:

Let’s zoom in again to get rid of a few stray hairs here and there, along with some around her eyebrows, using Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush tool (J). Get it from the Toolbox, make your brush size just a little larger than the hair you want to remove (as seen here) using the Bracket keys on your keyboard (they’re just to the right of the P key), and then paint right over those stray hairs to remove them.

STEP 11:

Go ahead and remove any other stray hairs using the same method, but since this is a business headshot, and not the cover of Vogue, we don’t have to remove them all—just those that really stand out. Also, while we’re here with this powerful tool, and with a really nice small brush size, let’s clean up the whites of her eyes some more, getting rid of any other little veins. Now the eyebrows look good, the larger stray hairs are gone, and the whites of her eyes are pretty clean.

STEP 12:

Let’s also do a simple little tweak using Photoshop’s Liquify filter. Go under the Filter menu, and right near the top, choose Liquify to bring up the dialog you see here. We’re only going to use one slider here, under the Face-Aware Liquify section, so scroll down to the Jawline slider and drag it to the left to strengthen her jawline (I dragged it to –33 here, at the bottom). When you’re done, click OK. Note: Turn the Preview checkbox on/off (at the bottom of the dialog) and you’ll really see the difference this makes.

STEP 13:

Now, let’s head back to Lightroom by pressing Command-S (PC: Ctrl-S) to save the image, and then close it. Back in Lightroom, you’ll find this edited image waiting right next to its original. Let’s add some sharpening to it, and then we’re done. So, go to the Detail panel, and in the Sharpening section, increase the Amount slider (as shown here, where I dragged it to 83). Then, press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and drag the Masking slider to the right until most of the image appears in solid black, so the sharpening (in white) is only applied to the detail areas (her eyes, eyebrows, lips, etc.), and not her skin (I dragged it to 81 here. More on sharpening portraits like this on page 71).