{"id":1901,"date":"2019-09-05T14:31:49","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T04:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nfgphoto.com\/blog\/?p=1901"},"modified":"2019-09-15T09:01:17","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T23:01:17","slug":"point-by-point-trang-joana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nfgphoto.com\/blog\/point-by-point-trang-joana\/","title":{"rendered":"Point by Point: Katana & Joana"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first step is the levels. Crop and straighten, exposure, contrast, colour balance etc. This is normally extra fun because of the extreme difference in skin colour between Joana and Katana, but I had a lighting setup that made this easier than it might normally have been. It didn’t require a lot of tweaking overall, just the adjustments shown below, and a touch of brightness on Katana’s face because it was in the shadows. And also I filled in the top corners where the wall ran out.<\/p>\n

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And then the fun part started! <\/p>\n

Here’s Joana’s face with its errant hairs. It’s way, way too much work to do hair believably, so I get it close and any unrealistic parts are lost when the image is reduced in size before the client sees it. Note the skin smoothing. I only remove temporary things unless asked, so blemishes are out, unwanted curves stay. Not much of the latter with this pair…<\/p>\n

\"Before\"After<\/div><\/div>\n

The human body is weird and gross when you look at it closely, and I love it. I do not believe in accepting every imperfection, because those imperfections are themselves imperfect. They’re only there depending on the angle of the light, or the type or colour of light, or what the body is doing. The xenon flash strobes I use in the studio penetrate the skin and create new blemishes that wouldn’t normally exist, and so… <\/p>\n

When the universe is creating the worst possible example of a body, I do whatever I think will bring it back to its beautiful state. I don’t change shapes, but I remove the details. Because if you saw this body in action, you wouldn’t notice these things, so why preserve them?<\/p>\n

\"Before\"After<\/div><\/div>\n

And then there’s the studio. The panels of the wall are constantly shrinking and enlarging with the seasons and I can’t fill or paint them enough to solve the problem, so every photo requires the same editing of the seams. And, in this case, lens flare as well.<\/p>\n

\"Before\"After<\/div><\/div>\n

And of course, the floor. It’s special concrete paint but it still scrapes, chips and marks like crazy. And by the end of every shoot it’s usually covered in hair, rhinestones, glitter, makeup, fake tan and more scrapes. This shot was from the beginning of the shoot. It only got worse. Depending on how the scene is lit and how the image is processed cleaning up the floor can account for up to 50% of the edit time.<\/p>\n

\"Before\"After<\/div><\/div>\n

This image was, overall, pretty easy to do. Good skin, good light, and a process that didn’t exacerbate the flaws. Higher contrast images create vastly greater amounts of work for me, as a rule. Consider this floor from another recent shoot. Same floor, different light, more contrast:<\/p>\n

\"Before\"After<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of things that can need fixing in a photo, even in the controlled studio environment. The number of things doubles for a shot with two bodies in it, and they take more space which increases the likelihood of large areas of the background that’ll need filling.<\/p>\n

Thankfully Joana and Katana are pretty good about this and didn’t bring me bodies covered in bruises or bad tans, and so the edits were relatively straightforward.<\/p>\n

Below is a point by point comparison of the before and after for this image:<\/p>\n

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