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Cindy Prins Style Portraits
Today’s Episode was a suggestion from Julie!
She wanted to edit images in a similar style to Cindy Prins, who is a great portrait photographer. She is looking to get a soft look. This is a great topic, because it is a type of editing that is very good in many situations. Some of what is necessary to get this type of image has to be done in the camera, so if you need some help with that, we can cover it too.
Basically you want to shoot with a shallow depth of field to give the background a nice blur. MMMMM BOKEHHHHHH. This can be done very well with an inexpensive lens like a Canon 50mm 1.8. You will also want to be sure your subject is not in direct light, like the sun on a cloudless day. You main goal here is to not have a huge difference between the highlights and the shadows of the photo.
Don’t worry about Over-Exposing the photo, you can take care of that in Photoshop.
Once you have your image, you will want to start out by taking care of the reds that exist in everyone’s skin.I use the Selective Color adjustment layer for this. Choosing to edit REDS, slide the slider on the bottom labeled BLACKS to the left. This will lighten the reds up, as well as take some of the color out. From there, It is a good idea to adjust your whites, blacks, greys, and other colors. Next we move on to taking a lot of the texture out of the skin.
A great way to do this is to make a STAMP VISIBLE Layer – CMD SHIFT OPTN E – and apply a surface blur to this layer. Choose a fairly liberal radius and threshold, don’t worry if it looks overdone, we are going to mask it out from the areas we don’t want it to be visible. On top of that I used a LEVELS Adj. Layer to brighten it up a bit. Putting those both in a group, and putting a black layer mask on the group, then lets me paint in the areas I want to be visible. Eyes can be made a bit more blue by painting a blue color over them, and changing your blending mode to SOFT LIGHT.
We also make the eyes lighter by painting white over them and using BLEND IF to make the white not visible where the underlying layer is darker. A few more steps in, we add some more detail by making a stamp visible layer, and desaturating SHIFT CMD U, the go to FILTER – OTHER – HIGH PASS. Choose a radius that slightly exaggerates the features of your image. Slap that layer into Soft Light or Overlay, and you are good to go!
Lets get on with making babies, and taking pictures along the way.
For some inspiration, check out this video, it had me crying by the end of it.
Question of the Day
What would you work very hard on, even if you were not paid? Why?
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