Today I will look at a process that is not quite as detailed as Vincent Versace's but follows the same type of photo examination. Here we have a n image of a young lady with a whole bunch of red in the photo. The red works but it might gain a finer look if we are able to provide a little more definition. So lets get to the process.
The secret to this process is the use of different shades of shades of gray or opacities of black. I have found that having the color swatch up the shades are just a click away. The brush is painted over a layer of 50% gray with the blend mode set to overlay. Any gray above 50% will darken the image and any below 50% will lighten the image.
This image is not that complex but I will show the definition for the purposes of this tutorial. Regardless of the definitioin layers, This teaches your eye to look at various elements of an image and how they interact. Ultimately the changes may be very subtle or stikeingly different. In this example we are going in the subtle direction.
Starting with the background (to the right), I wanted to change the way her hair was playing with the background on the right side. There just was not enough contrast between the two. This is a common problem when shooting brunettes on a dark background. If we were to simply lighten the yellow area we are going to effect the subject as well. There are different ways to handle this situation. You can simply paint around or isolate the subject to a separate layer as I have done here.
The goal on the background was to darken the light areas and lighten the dark areas, basically inverting the background.
This next image is where the subjects jacket needed some work. Additionally some background tweaking spots neede additional adjustment.
As you can see I had to use 100% to get the darkening I was looking for. If this had not been enough , I could have made an additional layer and darkened further.
Moving onto the subjects face. I am not going to get into the how far do you edit the subject discussion here. There are endless arguments on that hot topic. We really only what to provide definition and highlight in this process.
There was a little bit of specular action on her forehead and right cheekbone. It was not enough to clone out at a reduced opacity but they were just a bit hot. The loop shadow from her nose when darkened a bit gave better definition. Note that these two areas are both treated at 65% but a much different effect. This is due to the overlay blend mode.
Next was to give the left side of her chin some definition in the 65% area. Shoot some 55% at her neck and move onto her hair. Lightening her hair as shown by the 0% and 25% areas again gives further definition from the background. Even if a hair light had been used in this photo, the hair needed just a little more definition.
So what do we have here. Three areas of focus, background, foreground (jacket), and main subject. Anytime you can separate elements of and image and work with shades or raping light, you are adding to that third dimension that photographs simply do not have. What this does to the viewer is draw their eyes into the image. even if there is no leading angles to rid into the subject, the overall effect of depth dose a nice job.
As subtle as changes may be, the before and after image below gives a deeper effect to the after image. Part of the post processing is the amount of work taken to make it look just a little better so it does not look overworked.
Finally here is a larger final image you can look at to see the differences.
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