You can\'t fix bad lighting and composition with post processing. It\'s like shooting yourself in the foot and putting a bandage over the wound. The better strategy is learn to handle the gun so you don\'t keep shooting yourself in the foot
Compostion: The camera has two modes called, landscape and portrait, for a reason: landscapes wind up better composed horizontally, portraits vertically.
Your shot has three neophyte mistakes: shot horizontally with the head dead center and subject flat-footed and square to the camera The result is a static looking composition with an awkwardly cropped body with too much unimportant background. To improve:
1 - Shoot in portait mode
2 - Put the eyes along the upper 1/3 of the frame
3- Crop at bottom along the small part of the waist \\ /
4- Only include the background necessary for balanced composition.
5- Turn the subject at an angle to the camera and have them shift their weight to one foot /hip to angle the lines of the shoulders relative to the borders of the photo.
Lighting: If the subject is looking at the camera and viewer of the photo you usually want good light in the eyes. Then so nothing distracts from the eyes and mouth you want to keep the nose shadow as light and non-distracting as possible.
In most situations both natural and indoor lighting comes from so far overhead that eyes will be shaded by the brow as in your shot. There\'s only one solution for that if you can\'t move the light lower, you must move the face higher into the light. A very simple way to do that without a lot of complicated communication is to find something taller to stand on (stool, step ladder, chair) and tell the subject to look up at the camera. With face looking up and camera looking down the camera sensor and front of face will be parallel // just as on the ground || but you\'ll have much more flattering and appealing light on the face.
Next after getting light in the eyes pay attention to the shadows. Is the entire front of the face, both eyes and mouth, highlighted or half hidden in shadow because the subject has turned away from the key light. Try this approach using a north facing window: http://super.nova.org/Window
These are old shots from a 2001 tutorial I put together using my first digital camera but they illustate the above suggestions:
Turn the face towards the window until you see the front of the face highlighted by the light isn\'t spilling past the front onto the far side. Watch how the nose shadow is falling and try to have it fall along the base of the nose, not hang out sideways or too far down.
I shot standing on a chair identical to the one his foot is on with him looking up. It helps to get light past the brow and into the eyes and for older subjects tightens and slims the neck and slightly foreshortens the body sliming it.
That\'s not the only way to shoot a portrait of course, but if you master that way you should be able to figure out by trying it first then trying everything else what if anything works better to flatter your subject.
Beyond that the technical stuff is quite simple and routine:
1) Buy and use a commercial gray card to set White Balance: If you set Custom WB in the camera off the gray card and get it nominal in in the camera you will not need to correct it after the fact.
2) Expose for the highlights using the camera clipping warning, fill for the shadows per the left side of the histogram.
The clipping warning is your best guide for highlight exposure because it shows when and more importantly where highlights are clipping. It\'s like having a million + spot metering zones. But in order to see it you need a highlight in the photo that will clip. I used this target combination for setting exposure (when practical):
The gray card is used for step one, setting Custom WB. Next I adjust exposure until I see the white towel start to clip. It\'s the proxy for any white clothing the subject will be wearing. Also I know from experience that when the white objects are rendered just below clipping the skin highlights will also be reproduced perfectly. Once I adjust the exposure based on clipping in the highlights whether or not there is detail in the black towel and separation in the black patch of the MacBeth chart and the surrounding border is a function of two variables: camera DR and lighting contrast.
The test shot above was taken on a overcast day so the camera DR could handle the range of the scene and put detail in the black towel. But that\'s not the case on a sunny day...
In the shot above I exposed to keep detail in the sunlit parts of the white towel, but the camera DR couldn\'t handle the contrast of the lighting and rendered everything else darker than seen by eye. I could have adjusted exposure to make the front side look \"normal\" as seen by eye but that would blow the highlights by 2-3 stops.
I know when the camera can\'t handle the scene contrast by first exposing the white highlights below clipping and looking at the left side of the histogram. If it is piled up and running off the left side it tells me the scene range exceeds the sensor. My options are:
1 - Find a location such as open shade where the contrast of the scene is lower
2 - Use flash in the foreground to fit the foreground the flash hits to the sensor range
The goals technically are:
1) Neutral WB at capture (as a starting baseline)
2) Recording a full range of detail on the subject (what makes them look \"normal\").
If you are able to accomplish both of those in the camera all that\'s needed in Photoshop is retouching to remove blemishes, smooth skin, tone down distractions, etc. It\'s not really that difficult once you understand the concepts and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Photoshop cure.
May 15, 2012 at 06:53 AM
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