The picture taking was pretty straightforward -- pinned up a dark blue sheet in a little corridor with a low light ceiling and old darkish cream walls. Had the model perched on the arm of a chair. Had an FL50 flash on top of the E-PL3 fitted with the f1.8 45mm (90mm equiv) lens, bouncing off the ceiling. That was it (my attempts to use two flashes fell apart, dammit -- I wanted to bring in a second flash from above and left of the picture to make a hair and rim light).
The lens is too damned sharp!
In PL, I tweaked the green curve (Tool > Curves > then select the green curve) a bit to get rid of a slight green cast from the ambient fluorescent lighting. Next, I fixed the girl's nails -- they were cut off square because she does restaurant work so they were cut for practicality. These showed up badly on the second, third and fourth fingers. So for each of those, I used the vector curve tool to draw a crescent as close to the top of the nail as I could, converted that outline to a lasso (Tool > Lasso > Convert Layer to Lasso), then copied and pasted it. I then moved it to the right and up as necessary with the arrow keys to achieve a conservative rounded nail. I could have repeated it to go further, but felt that I didn’t want to gild the lily. Gilding would come later!
Then there were the eyes. Tiredness and a slightly allergic reaction to the make up had reddened them. I decided to go for broke on the eyes -- I outlined the whites with the vector tool, converted that to a lasso (as above), then did some heavy lifting with hue, saturation, and brightness to get the result you see. (Too dramatic? These are for packaging and posters.)
Now -- when I took the pic I had forgotten the earrings as had Lucy. She had them on when she came into the salon for hairdressing and make-up; we forgot to put them back on after. Ho hum!!! So she came back for a quick session so I could take some pix of her with earrings and then take the earrings out of that and paste them into the formal shots. Not the best way to work, but hey . . .
No need for make-up or hairdressing -- or anything else. I set up the computer to show her the shots I wanted her to mimic, selected the earrings from a selection she brought along, she adopted the pose (or tried to -- have you any idea how difficult it is to imitate yourself in a particular pose?) with coaching from me, and I snapped away with the same camera/flash outfit but sans the sheet in the background.
We got close enough to the correct poses and sizing of the ear and earrings in the new shots to go on to the next step.
This involved opening the original picture, opening the new picture, drawing a freehand lasso around the earring, copying it then pasting it into the original picture. In one case, I tweaked the size -- the earring was a bit too small. To accurately place the earring, I put crossed guides over the ear piercing hole visible in the original photo, then brought the new element in under that.
All that remained was with the pasted layer selected, to carefully erase the remnant image in and around the earring leaving just the earring sitting on the original picture. (There should be another step here -- add a visibility mask to the layer I was erasing to ensure I got a clear background. I must have done that somehow, but I don’t know how! It was just there!)
That worked fine, but the silver earrings I had added looked excellent in life but were too obtrusive in the picture. So I took a very narrow brush, selected a dark yellow color, set the brush to about 28% opacity, and painted away (at very high magnification -- a very important point when doing such work!). I gilded the earring and it really made a difference.
I then reduced everything to a single layer, opened the plug-in, Topaz Adjust, and applied "Portrait Smooth" which smoothed out the skin and tones and introduced some reddening. (PL has a filter, Effects > Special Tools > Beautify -- I only discovered it today by accident so I've never actually used it).
Finally, I returned to PL and used the Remove Brush (the one with the green field and black spots) to clean up a few bits of localized skin roughness that remained.
The result is what you see! Except it isn't. The picture is showing up quite a bit redder that what I see in PL on my screen and how it prints on an HP printer. But you get the idea.
Oh damn! I was supposed to be emphasizing the hair, wasn't I? I'm in love with the face!
Best regards
Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com
