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I really like the photoshop step of setting the white point in levels to get a clean white backdrop!

THis is a two light shot. One light on the backdrop, spilling towards subject to provide some contrast/rim lighting, and a large softbox camera left. White reflector camera right.

This is an improvement on my last few white backdrop shoots, but please, lay it on and help me to improve.

THanks in advance for your feedback and constructive input.

Hi Bruce,

Technically: Skin tones are way too orange (at least on my CRT). Background looks good, but the lighting on background is somewhat uneven. Have a look on LHS how there are some patches that are not blown. You need a better light distribution over background and this can be fixed by either position of background light or using two lights in the background. Or you can easily fix it in PS by using clone tool

Pose seems forced, but I guess you are more interested in technical aspects at this point. Sharpness is fine this time. Do you run USM on image resized for web?

Cheers

Alex

colours look fine on my screen tho her tan is rather splotchy and uneven. On a side note, this is what i dislike about fake tans - people tend to not put it on evenly and it ends up making it worse hence the silly practise of it in the first place.

Alex wrote:Technically: Skin tones are way too orange (at least on my CRT). Background looks good, but the lighting on background is somewhat uneven. Have a look on LHS how there are some patches that are not blown. You need a better light distribution over background and this can be fixed by either position of background light or using two lights in the background. Or you can easily fix it in PS by using clone tool

Pose seems forced, but I guess you are more interested in technical aspects at this point. Sharpness is fine this time. Do you run USM on image resized for web?

thanks Alex. The tan at the time was very warm, so it will certainly look orange compared to a natural winter skin tone.

Agree on the back lighting. I was using one light deliberately for another look, next time I intend to use a bounced reflector each side, which should blow it out evenly. I also intend to get the grey card out, as I now have more confidence in my colors since Wayne helped me with CS2 color management.

No USM on this one. I have been practising on my focusing technique, still room for improvement.

PiroStitch wrote:colours look fine on my screen tho her tan is rather splotchy and uneven. On a side note, this is what i dislike about fake tans - people tend to not put it on evenly and it ends up making it worse hence the silly practise of it in the first place.

thanks Wayne,

Good to know that the colors look fine on your screen, as you have seen them directly on my monitor, so my color management may be ok (at least much better than before last week).

fake tan is hard to deal with sometimes.

Does anyone in here have experience, or knowledge of tools, to retouch fake tan? for example, if its a cream based tan, often the subjects hands are much more tanned then say the arms...

She looks orange to me, but then if she has a fake tan, she probably is orange, so it probably isn't a white balance issue.

I had a go at giving her what I would regard as more normal skin tones. (Please let me know if you want me to remove this image).

I simply used hue/sat in Photoshop, selected reds and clicked an area on her chest, then set hue to -4, sat to 0, and lightness to +31. I probably made her a little bit pale, but at least this is a pretty easy way to do it.



Edit: Pat has rightly pointed out that I should have masked out her hair first as I have made it too grey. But anyway, you get the idea.

nice, and thanks for including your PP steps. Its helps me a lot. No prob editing my images.

She is a little pale, but only just. I think you have it pretty close to actual. Her hair color has a grey color in there, so that is close to actual too.

THanks for including your color adjustments, I'll give it a go now!

first time i have used single color adjustment, i like its selectiveimpact!!! thanks!

compared to the first post, this is much closer to actual