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. Why does the image on the back of the camera, and the one shown on my screen in Lightroom look so different? The camera is showing the view with just room light, before the flashes have fired.

SIDE VIEW: I removed the front diffusion panels from the two strip bank softboxes in the back to make the light from the flashes less soft and more punchy. All you have between the flash and your subject is the thin interior baffle, which is just designed to keep from having a hot spot in the center of the softbox.

BEHIND THE SCENES

SIDE VIEW: The two flashes in the back have colored gels taped over the front of them with black gaffer’s tape. To find a color combination that works for your gels, do an online search for “Color Wheel,” choose the first color you want, and then choose the color directly across from it on the wheel to find a complementary color. I wanted a little movement in her hair, so I used a fan mounted on a rolling stand.

BACK VIEW: The flash in front doesn’t have a gel on it, and it’s used to add a little normal light into the scene—kind of a fill flash. You’ll see multi-gel looks using just those two flashes in the back (no front flash), so you might want to try a few shots without the front flash on.

CAMERA SETTINGS

OTHER INFO

BACKGROUND:

Solid black Savage Widetone Seamless Background Paper (see page 80 for more on this background).

GELS:

Rogue Flash Gels attached to flashes.

HAIR FAN:

A NiceFoto SF-1 Hair Fan on a rolling stand to add movement to our subject's hair.

EDITING/RETOUCHING

In this project, we’ll get to do a little more advanced skin retouching, using a very popular technique called “frequency separation.” It takes a few steps, but it’s easy, and it’s a perfect thing to create a Photoshop action for, so it does all the repetitive steps for you with just one click (check out the video I made for you on how to create a Photoshop action on the book’s companion webpage—you can find the link to it on page xii of the book’s intro).

STEP ONE:

Here’s our original RAW image in Lightroom’s Develop module. Now normally, with portraits, we’re looking for a flatter-looking image for our starting place, so we choose the Adobe Portrait profile, but in this case, we’re going for a more contrasty look, so we’re going to choose Adobe Landscape for our RAW profile (from the Profile popup menu near the top left of the Basic panel). You can see in the before/after here, the result is a slightly warmer, more contrasty starting place.

STEP TWO:

This RAW image is quite a bit underexposed, so to get our exposure in a decent place, simply drag the Exposure slider over to around +1.25 (around 1-1/4 stops brighter). You can also try the Auto button (on the right side of the Basic panel), which I did, but it increased the Shadows slider way too much (her skin started to look a little HDR’d), and the rest of the sliders weren’t helping much. So, I hit Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z) to Undo the Auto toning. Just dragging that Exposure slider over to +1.25 will do the trick.

STEP THREE:

Lighting-wise, this image doesn’t have any “falloff.” The light on her face should be the brightest, and then it should gradually get darker as you move down. You can do this during the shoot using a flag (a black piece of foam core or fabric) to block the bottom half of the softbox, but since I didn’t do that, we’ll do it here in Lightroom. We can use a slick little masking trick, so that the falloff stays on her and doesn’t affect the background (and I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention that the background is nearly black and you probably wouldn’t notice it anyway). Start by clicking 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, click on the Subject icon. The area that appears in the red tint shows what it selected (as seen here).

STEP FOUR:

Now that our subject is selected, click on the Subtract button near the bottom right of the Masks panel (if you don’t see it, click on Mask 1). Click on Linear Gradient in the popup menu (as shown here), and we’ll use this to remove her face from the mask, with a smooth transition from her face to her body. With this tool selected, click in the center of her face and drag straight downward. As you do, it removes most of her face from the selection (as seen here), so now when we darken the exposure, it won’t darken her face, just the areas that still appear in the red tint overlay.

STEP FIVE:

Now, go to the adjustment sliders and drag the Exposure slider to the left to darken the exposure (to around –0.64), creating the falloff I didn’t create during the shoot. You can also pull the Highlights slider back a little (here, I dragged it back to –10).

STEP SIX:

Let’s add a little more light to her eyes—but not just her eyes, her whole eye socket areas. At the top of the Masks panel, click on Create New Mask, and then click on Brush (K) in the pop-up menu. In the adjustment sliders, increase the Exposure slider to around half a stop (0.50), and then paint over her eye sockets (as shown here).

STEP SEVEN:

Now, let’s brighten up her glasses a bit. Click on Create New Mask again, and then click on Brush. Drag the Exposure slider to the right to around 1 stop (1.00), and then paint over her glasses, which helps them really stand out (as seen here).

STEP EIGHT:

When we brightened the exposure for our subject, it made the background a little brighter than it should be (look at the image in the previous step, and you can see the background isn’t solid black). But, that’s an easy fix. Click on Create New Mask again, and then click on Select Background. That selects everything but our subject. It selects the background, so now it’s the only thing selected.

STEP NINE:

With the background selected, drag the Exposure slider over to the left to around –2.00 (two stops) to make the background solid black (as seen here). Now, let’s head over to Photoshop to do some fixes and retouching by pressing Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E). Note: We could probably do some of the things we’re about to do in Photoshop here in Lightroom (like getting rid of the softbox and removing some blemishes), but since we’re going over there anyway for some retouching stuff, we’ll just do it there. That way, if you run into something Lightroom can’t remove, you’ll know how to remove stuff like this in Photoshop.

STEP 10:

Once the image opens in Photoshop (since it’s a RAW file, it opens right up), get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) from the Toolbox on the left and drag out a rectangular selection around the softbox in the top right (you can see it in the previous step). Now, go under Photoshop’s Edit menu and choose Fill. When the Fill dialog appears, make sure Content-Aware is selected from the Contents pop-up menu up top, and then click OK to get rid of that softbox (as shown here). In case you’re wondering why we need to use Content-Aware Fill, and not just set our Foreground color to black and fill the rectangle with solid black, it’s because by doing it this way, we keep any grain or texture in the image. If we filled it with solid black, we’d probably have to go and add some noise to that area for it to blend in with the rest of the image (in other words, the solid black would look too smooth). You can press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect now.

STEP 11:

There are a few minor blemishes on her forehead, so let’s zoom in so we can work on those (press Command-+ [plus sign; PC: Ctrl-+]). Get the Healing Brush tool from the Toolbox (or just press Shift-J until you have it), and then make your brush size a little larger than the blemishes you want to remove (you can use the same keyboard shortcuts you use in Lightroom: the Left Bracket key makes the brush smaller; the Right Bracket key makes it larger). Now, pressand-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click in a clean area next to the blemish you want to remove, then move your cursor over the blemish and click once to remove it (as shown here).

STEP 12:

Continue removing blemishes with the Healing Brush tool until the most obvious blemishes are removed (as seen here). Next, we’re going to do some skin smoothing, but we’re going to do a little more of an advanced version, which helps better blend the gradations in tone on her skin. It takes a few steps, but it works wonders.

STEP 13:

This skin smoothing technique is called “frequency separation.” This is a simplified version of it, so while it still takes a few steps, it’s actually very easy. Start by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) twice to create two duplicate layers of your Background layer (as seen here, bottom right). Once you’ve done that, hide the top layer (Layer 1 copy) by clicking the eye icon to the left of the layer thumbnail. Now that the top layer is hidden, click on the middle layer (Layer 1), then go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. We want to add enough blur here to fully smooth the skin—I usually find this happens by dragging the Radius slider over to the right to between 5 and 7 pixels (as shown here, where I dragged it over to 5). Click OK.

STEP 14:

Now, click on the top layer (Layer 1 copy) and make it visible again by clicking where the eye icon used to be to the left of its layer thumbnail. Then, go under the Image menu and choose Apply Image. When its dialog appears, from the Layer pop-up menu near the top, choose Layer 1 (the middle layer), and then from the Blending pop-up menu, choose Subtract. There are only two other settings to change here: for Scale, enter 2, and for Offset, enter 128, and then click OK. This will turn this layer gray (as seen here), with just the highlights and shadow areas showing up against that solid gray.

STEP 15:

Next, go near the top left of the Layers panel and change the layer Blend mode of this top layer from Normal to Linear Light. When you do this, the image returns to looking normal (as seen here), and even though the gray layer is visible, because it’s in Linear Light mode, the layer appears transparent. However, we needed this layer to create skin texture because the magic of frequency separation is that while it smooths the skin, you can still clearly see skin texture when you’re done (it doesn’t blur the pores and detail away). That’s why this is such a popular technique.

STEP 16:

We now have to tell Photoshop which area we want to apply the skin smoothing to. So, get the Lasso tool (L) from the Toolbox, and then clickand-drag out a selection around the area you want softened (as shown here, where I drew a selection around most of her forehead). To make sure this area we’re about to smooth blends smoothly with the surrounding skin, we need to soften the edges of our selection. So, go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Feather Selection. In its dialog, enter a Feather Radius of 15 pixels (as seen here), and then click OK

STEP 17:

The final step is to blur that selected area. In the Layers panel, click on the middle layer (as shown here, bottom right), then go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. Now, all you have to do here is enter 24 pixels, click OK, and it smooths the skin, but it adds pores built from the original ones, and it looks pretty awesome. You get the smoothing without the loss of detail or blurring. Now, if you’re working on an image from a 50-megapixel camera (or higher), you may have to increase the Radius amount, so don’t be afraid to raise it if your results aren’t looking like this. What’s nice is, now that we have this all set up, we can go to other areas of her face and just do the last two steps: select the area you want to smooth and add a 15-pixel feather, and then add a Gaussian Blur.

STEP 18:

Let’s move down to the areas around her nose. Using the Lasso tool, we’ll start by selecting that area between her eyes, then press-and-hold the Shift key (which lets us add more areas to the selection we already have in place), and select the area between the glasses, and then while keeping the Shift key held down, select the bridge of her nose, as well (as seen here). With those three areas selected, go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Feather. It should still be set to 15 pixels, so just click OK, and then add the 24-pixel Gaussian Blur again to smooth out these areas. That’s the process from here on out for other skin areas (like her chin).

STEP 19:

Once you’re done with all the skin areas (be sure to press Command-D [PC: Ctrl-D] to Deselect), this will probably look like too much softening, but that’s okay—we have an easy way to control the amount after the fact. First, in the Layers panel, click on the top layer, then press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to create a new layer at the top of the layer stack that looks like a flattened version of the image (which it is, but it is its own separate layer). Now, hide the two middle layers (Layer 1 copy and Layer 1). This top layer (Layer 2) is the version of the image with the skin softening, and the Background layer is the one without any softening, which means you can simply lower the Opacity slider for this top layer to lower the amount of softening (like I did here, to 50%). The lower the Opacity, the less intense the softening.

STEP 20:

Now, from the File menu, choose Save, and then close the image to send it back to Lightroom, where it will appear right beside the original. Back in Lightroom, zoom in on her eyes because even though we brightened her eye sockets earlier, her eyes themselves still look a little dark, and their whites look a little blueish. So, click on the Masking tool again, then click on Brush, and then paint over the bottom 2/3 of each eye. Drag the Exposure slider to the right to 0.55 to brighten her eyes, and then drag the Temp slider a little to the right (to 32) to warm them up and to get rid of the blue tint (as seen here). Note: You can also create Iris and Pupil and Eye Sclera masks to do this, as well (see page 11 for more on this)

STEP 21:

To wrap things up, let’s add some sharpening. Go to the Detail panel and in the Sharpening section, increase the Amount slider to around 70, and then drag the Masking slider to 100, so the sharpening avoids her skin and just sharpens the detail areas, like her eyes, eyebrows, hair, glasses, lips, etc. (see page 71 for more on sharpening women). There’s an optional finishing move you could add, and that’s to go near the top right of the Basic panel and click on the icon with the four little rectangles to bring up the Profiles Browser. Scroll down to the Modern set and give some of those a try (I like Modern 02, 06, 08, and 10). These creative profiles shift the color and some give a flatter, more modern, lower-contrast look. Try them. You might find one you really like.