Thursday, July 28, 2011

Before and Afters - the Magic behind the camera

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I won't go too much into Bailey's senior shoot because I have a BUNCH of photos to share (this afternoon??!), but I will say she's been dreaming of being made up as Marilyn Monroe, who she idiolizes, for years now.

This was just one of 9236 awesome photos. OK, maybe not QUITE that many, but still, culling photos last night was almost painful.

However, sometimes things don't go exactly as how you see them in your head, so you have to do some work to them. I wanted to show you how drastically different the before/afters were on this photo.

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Straight out of the camera shot, vs full edit shot.

Kind of embarassed by my SOOC as it's kind of dark. I realized into the shoot that I needed white behind Bailey, so I added a reflector behind her as a backdrop. However, I really liked her expression in an earlier shot. I pulled the background from a later shot and used that around her head. I then pulled photo into lightroom and added fill light for the dark side of her face. I then used the infared preset which blew out the fur completely, so I pulled it back a bit with recovery and reducing the brightness. I then pulled it into PSP to fix any blemishes (I don't use photoshop for this, I really like PSP and have used it for 10 years, I can work fast in that program).

This is one of the few photos I MIGHT add a white vignette. I had one on, and liked it, but I lost too much of the hands so I removed it.

And this is where I'm going to admit something else.... I don't shoot RAW. Ever. I only shoot JPG and I've yet to have a problem ONE time with it. I suck at change, I like things the way that they are, and this is what works well for me.

My point is, that jpg is way more forgiving that people give credit.

If you have any before and after shots, feel free to share your links!
(and like I said, probably this afternoon/evening I'll have photos of Bailey up!)

1 comment:

Jessie K said...

Gorgeous photos and what a pretty girl!

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