This is Naomi. This image has been tweaked, polished, rotated, cropped, airbrushed, cloned and otherwise beaten into its current condition.

But of course it didn’t start this way. As the next two images show, the starting point was drastically different, and even after getting the composition and tone dialed in there was much more to do.

You can see that the starting point doesn’t really resemble the final image. As is always the case, it’s crooked. Shooting pole means there’s always a perfect vertical reference to drive home this fact. I’ve never felt so completely tilted until I’ve edited thousands of pole photos and straightened nearly all of them as a first step. The next step, of course, was cropping it to hide the silver majesty that is the NFGstudio’s insulation.

The next step is the toning. I’m getting a lot better at creating images that look good straight out of the camera, but they usually benefit from some additional adjustments. For this image I applied just about every tool in the box, nothing was left untouched. Exposure, contrast, brightness and saturation. Shadows were brought up, highlights were brought down, and a little bit of sharpening was added. I bashed the curves, massaged the histogram and threw in some vignetting because I love dark corners.

And then I cloned the lights out of the shot. I don’t remember why, but it seemed easier to erase her leg than the softbox it replaced. Honestly, looking back at it now, I don’t know what I was thinking. I had to fill in the right side corners after the leg was removed. And finally, the usual skin smoothing. The electric lights tend to make even the smoothest skin look blotchy, and so this last step is pretty much universally applied. It’s probably the single greatest time sink in the process.