Access Digital Photography

The instant I saw Rachel Hackshaw sitting in everybody’s favorite coffee house in the Casco Viejo neighborhood of Panama City (where I happen to do a lot of these blogs) I knew she’d be a great model to shoot for stock agencies. Though her face is just covered with pimples and freckles, that’s just not what people notice about her. It’s that she’s just beautiful, full of energy, and just loves being expressive as a means of communication. I knew she’d be more than worth every pennies worth of time it would take to retouch out all those pimples. Here’s the unretouched photograph:

One of the reasons that I wasn’t that worried about how much time I’d have to put in to “fixing her skin” was that I’ve worked with an amazing Photoshop plug-in, Anthropic’s Portrait Professional, that does an amazing job of doing most of the work for you. It “coaches” you through placing a series of control points so that the program can know the shape and angle of the face and what portions of the image need a lot of surface smoothing and what portions (such as hair and eyelashes) want to be razor-sharp. Then you click a button and wait for about a minute. Then you can still make various parts of the face smoother or more detailed (some people prize their freckles, for instance), either by dragging sliders or by brushin over specific areas with a “Magic Brush”.

Here’s the end result of about three minute’s work. Retouching almost the entire shoot so that I could capitalize on her endless variety of expressions should be well worth the time once the 97 chosen pictures get to the stock agencies.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2011 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Digital Photography News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.