Look at the original image, and you’ll see I did quite a lot of work, including “moving” her to the side to align the image more with “the rule of thirds,” plus a few other adjustments and painting in some areas of the skin to get better tonality and control of highlights.

What I’m really working towards learning is the sort of full-scale “digital painting” that MichaelO does.

I suspect, though, that I’m not going to live long enough for that.

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I’ve never had a model before who needed almost no direction from me to strike a good pose.  The flash went off — *poof!* — new pose.  The flash went off again — *poof!* — another new pose.  Like shooting models in a barrel.  Only as you can see, there’s no barrel surrounding this gal.

For more of this lovely lady, check out the full album of minimally edited images here.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I thought some folks might like a better look at the finished version of Erin’s image.  In the larger image here, you can see that my post-processing in Photoshop included a little “digital painting” of portions of the image.  Some of this was achieved using a Kodak Plug-In that is meant to airbrush the skin tones.  However, unless you create two layers and mask one of them, the effect isn’t limited to skin; it impacts the entire image.  Personally, I like the effect — and, besides, sometimes masking just takes longer than I want to spend on an image.

In addition to the Kodak Digital Gem Airbrush Pro plug-in, I used the cloning, dodging and burning tools within Photoshop to tweak shadows and for some cosmetic retouching to enhance the “digital painting” look of the image.

What I really aspire to is the type of work done by digital artist MichaelO.

Hey, everyone has to have some unreachable pipe-dream of a goal in life to keep them pushing forward, nu?

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• Erin Before & After
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I knew there was no way to get good balanced lighting in this image. Erin likes to sit on the windowsill of my sixth floor office and watch the sun going down while we chat about the day’s happenings.  The sun coming in that window is just too strong and the flourescent lighting in my office is unable to balance it out.

A flash — such as the 580 EX II, not yet purchased at the time— or perhaps even a reflector inside combined with a diffuser held in her hand outside could have balanced things out so I could, as one of my photographer friends likes to put it, “get it right in the camera.”  But I had a feeling that if I shot it just right I could get it into Photoshop and do something nice with it there.

First stop, however, was Adobe Lightroom 2, where I did as much tweaking as the program would allow before sending it over to Photoshop CS4 for some additional work and finishing touches.

I think you’ll agree it worked out quite nicely.  But, then, it’s hard to screw things up when you have one of the world’s more beautiful women perched upon your windowsill.

Comments

• May 5, 2009, Photoshop Painting | So Shoot Me! writes: [...] a follow up to yesterday’s post, I thought some folks might like a better look at the finished version of Erin’s image.  In [...]

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• Photoshop Painting