There is someone I want to shoot who has great freckles on here face. I want to take a portrait where the freckles really stand out. She light skin and the freckles are fairly light as well so they don't stand out really well in normal circumstances.
Does anyone have tips on how I can make the freckles "pop"? Is it something I should do with the lighting or in post-processing?
I can only think of playing around with the light color try to get the best refract from the skin and hope the freckles absorb that light temperature more then the skin.
Best way I know is in post processing. But I'm sure U knew that.
That mode takes light areas lighter and dark areas darker increasing the contrast between them. Adjust the opacity slider on the dupe layer to taste or if you want to apply the effect only to selected areas add a black bitmap mask to the dupe layer then selectively erase the mask where you want the added contrast.
A more esoteric method in Photoshop is channel blending via the "Apply Image" function. It involves blending the channel in an RGB copy of the file containing the most freckle detail into the Luminance channel of an indentical copy in Lab mode saved in .psd format:
2) In the LAB file open Channels and press cmd+1 to select the L target channel, then press ~ so the color image is displayed in the edit window. This step needs to be done correctly for the technique to work. The channels window should appear as in the example above with only the L channel highlighted.
3) Open Adjustments > Apply Image Select the RGB file and the Blue or Green channel as the source, whichever has the most detail in the freckles. I used the Blue channel for the example above. Apply the Blue channel information to the L channel in overlay mode then adjust opacity by eye.
4) Convert the Lab file back to RGB mode and save.
Another way to make the freckles stand out would be to shoot with the camera in B/W mode with a green filter simulation.
Select all light areas with CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-Tilde...
Hit CTRL-SHIFT-I to invert the selection. Hit CTRL J to copy the selected darks to a new layer. Set layer blending mode to Multiply and adjust the opacity of the layer until the freckles look the way you like.
Create a layer mask to exclude all of the non-freckle areas...
If you don't get enough pop, duplicate the Multiply layer one or more times.
j/k