Processing Tutorial
So by the request of Javier Ruiz, I’ve prepared a processing tutorial for one of my recent photos of the absolutely flawless Leslie Angevine!
Here’s the final image:
April 18th, 2015, Treasure Island, FL
Here’s the original image:
I do perform quite a bit of cleanup in Adobe’s RAW Editor, that I of course cannot visually break down step by step. I can, however, teach you about these tools and how to use them, assuming you’re working with RAW images.
First and foremost, I do use VSCO presets more often than not. These tend to be a great starting point from which to build. In my experience, these presets are almost never click-and-go, they will always require a significant amount of tweaking, but they’re a good place to start. In this case, I started with VSCO’s Canon iteration of Fuji Velvia 100, one of my favorite films to shoot with, slide or print.
From there, I pulled my Temperature down from 5200 to 4650 and Tint from 5 to 0. This image already contains so much red between Leslie’s skin, hair and dress, and dropping these numbers brings down the overall warmth of the photo. When your whites and skin are already rosy to begin with, it’s going to pull away a lot of the pop from her red hair and bright blue eyes. We want whites to be white, not slightly warm. This adjustment will also pull a lot of the red out of her hair, but we’ll be fixing that as a standalone adjustment later.
Next, I altered all of my adjustments: Exposure and blacks came down whereas everything else went up, aside from shadows, which were kept the same. In an already bright photo, I only pulled exposure and blacks down to give myself a slightly more even image to build upon. Whites, shadows and highlights were all increased to give me that bright, washed out background I was going for. Vibrance and contrast were also increased a bit to give Leslie’s hair a bit more pop.
I still felt like Leslie’s skin was covered with a bit of a pink haze, so I then went into split toning in RAW Editor and saturated my highlights with a bit of green to balance out the pink.
Split toning is this little tool up here:
That will give you a screen like this:
Here, you can pump a little bit of color into your highlights and/or your shadows separately. So in that sense it’s a bit like a color filter or color balance that is controlled in two independent parts for your brights and your darks.
Here’s the image with that bit of green put into the highlights:
From there, I also lightened Leslie’s eyes just a touch. That can be done in RAW Editor from this little tool up here:
This allows for much more detailed adjustments that work a lot like layer masking in Photoshop. This tool allows you to draw on adjustments only to the areas to which you want them applied. They can then be added to, erased, or new ones can be started, and other previously applied adjustments can be selected in order to see where they’ve been applied or to alter your adjustments if you change your mind. Here, I’ve pulled up exposure, clarity and sharpness. I also cleaned up Leslie’s skin just a touch; that adjustment is included in the screenshot below, as the difference is very small and isn’t really worth its own frame.
Now I’m ready to actually open the image in Photoshop.
I created two frequency separation layers. You can learn how to do that and what its creation does from this wonderful little tutorial created by Sarah Kiesling. I generally just do this out of habit in case I later find something I didn’t clean up in RAW Editor; it just so happens I didn’t touch either of these layers in this particular image.
First and foremost, I created a blank layer, drew in a darker pink from elsewhere on her face to fill in the stark white on Leslie’s forehead. I painted in this area with this slightly darker pink and pulled the opacity of the layer down to 14%. This creates an extremely subtle but difference when looking between the two, but a very large difference in the final image. Mind you this is a screenshot taken at 300% just to show the difference between the color shades:
This small adjustment gives Leslie a more even and natural skin tone.
From here, I created an Exposure layer in which I pull up the offset to pull my blacks away from black and into gray shades. On top of that, I place a Brightness/Contrast layer with no adjustments on Soft Light blending mode. This technique is something I do a lot to create that slightly filmy, hazy, almost magazine print kind of look. In this image, I used this technique but didn’t quite like the effect, so rather than that B/C layer to bring back some of the shadows, I used an auto Levels layer and moved my B/C layer underneath my pink paint layer with just the slightest increase in brightness to offset some of the levels.
All of these adjustments were very very small and primarily affected Leslie’s hair. Nothing particularly technical or difficult to learn, just tweaking brightness and contrast and that little trick for blown out skin.
A final crop shaving a chunk off the right and bottom for balance and that’s all there is to it! Here’s the before and after side by side:
Make sure you go view the image large and give it a like/favorite on Facebook and Flickr!