HOME | DD

Description
I wanted to give an example of what it is I do when I edit. It really doesn't look like much, because I don't want them to look over processed, but in reality, I do spend some time on them.

So for the image above, here's what I did.

The first thing was the broad strokes: Color balance, brightness/contrast, etc.. In this case, a simple white balance gave me warm skin tones fitting of a sunset scene.

The crop is obvious, but there was actually one thing I did before that -- I reduced some of the haze coming from the top left corner. Even though it would ultimately be cropped out, I felt it would look smoother to do that first. Then I cropped for a better composition.

Next, I worked on cloning out blemishes (the fringe on the bikini bottom, stray hair, etc.). In this case, I also had a little challenge of removing that green bin, which was behind the fence (that was a little tricky - there wasn't much I could use to clone that out).

Then I sharpened the image a bit, using a complicated process that I won't bore people with (I might put together a tutorial) Not everything is universally sharpened, since I actually had some parts that I wanted to soften in the next step.

Then I did a mild smoothing of the skin. I never overdo this part. I'd rather see pores than have the model look like plastic.

I then moved out from the subject, slowly subtly darkening toward the corners of the image to help the subject "pop" a bit. Think of it like vignetting, but not just the one-click soft black oval. I have a method.

The last step was a little global split-toning, which again I almost always do so subtly that one can barely tell, but I can, so I think it makes a difference.

So there it is. It's like, 100 steps and 20 layers all to basically make it look like I really didn't do anything. But I'm picky that way.

Model: Cassandra

Description
I wanted to give an example of what it is I do when I edit. It really doesn't look like much, because I don't want them to look over processed, but in reality, I do spend some time on them.

So for the image above, here's what I did.

The first thing was the broad strokes: Color balance, brightness/contrast, etc.. In this case, a simple white balance gave me warm skin tones fitting of a sunset scene.

The crop is obvious, but there was actually one thing I did before that -- I reduced some of the haze coming from the top left corner. Even though it would ultimately be cropped out, I felt it would look smoother to do that first. Then I cropped for a better composition.

Next, I worked on cloning out blemishes (the fringe on the bikini bottom, stray hair, etc.). In this case, I also had a little challenge of removing that green bin, which was behind the fence (that was a little tricky - there wasn't much I could use to clone that out).

Then I sharpened the image a bit, using a complicated process that I won't bore people with (I might put together a tutorial) Not everything is universally sharpened, since I actually had some parts that I wanted to soften in the next step.

Then I did a mild smoothing of the skin. I never overdo this part. I'd rather see pores than have the model look like plastic.

I then moved out from the subject, slowly subtly darkening toward the corners of the image to help the subject "pop" a bit. Think of it like vignetting, but not just the one-click soft black oval. I have a method.

The last step was a little global split-toning, which again I almost always do so subtly that one can barely tell, but I can, so I think it makes a difference.

So there it is. It's like, 100 steps and 20 layers all to basically make it look like I really didn't do anything. But I'm picky that way.

Model: Cassandra