Quick overview of my post workflow for a Harley Quinn cosplay photoshoot.
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retouching
I recently collaborated with model, Aneesah Hanan and makeup artist, Tony Stylez for a high fashion themed shoot. As you can see, they both did a great job and with their help, we got a great image. The photos straight out of the camera looked great but I wanted to practice my retouching skills and make this image shine.
In the video below, you can see my progress as I just about edited every pixel of this photo. From adding extra eyelashes, dodging and burning to bring out and enhance features to removing an ear-piercing hole, this photo is polished. Don’t get me wrong, Aneesah looked amazing with no editing whatsoever but this shoot was an exercise in attaining the super-clean and expertly polished beauty shot. While many companies are shying away from retouching, there is still a very strong desire for this level of perfection. Plus you still see Aneesah’s natural beauty and features – we’re not talking about changing nose shape or manufacturing cheekbones here.
Quick overview of the retouching process.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you already know that I love sports and fitness photography. For this shoot, I wanted to try a new twist and work with composite photography, which is the art of combining two or more photos and perfectly harmonizing the lighting, color balance, proportions, tones, shadows, etc. to create a single cohesive image. If done properly, it can be very convincing.
Composite photography is becoming a widely popular technique, especially in the advertising industry to achieve a polished, perfected look or to capture a scene that would normally be too difficult to do in one take.
While we didn’t know it prior to the shoot, composite was going to be the only option for our photo! The shoot date happened to coincide with the height of Atlanta’s pollen season and our poor model Siobhan was having respiratory problems. While we had intended on a series of photos inside as well as outside, we were stuck indoors, in a studio setting for this shoot.
Our model Siobhan was a real trooper and gave it her all despite her terrible allergies. For the entire shoot I had the poor girl running, jumping, lunging, you name it! I would regularly ask her if she needed to take a rest but she always wanted to push on to get the perfect shot, but did have to sit down a few times when her cough got the best of her.
A few days later I took some outdoor shots to use as Siobhan’s backdrop. Put everything together in Photoshop and voila! What do you think?