Portrait Editing – The Same Thing Only Different

So hand-in-hand with my journey with photography has been my journey with Photoshop Elements.  The software itself was easy enough for me to pick up – adding layers to things on-screen comes naturally to me as it is pretty much what I do for a living.  I guess one of my biggest challenges though has been learning what the different options do and how they affect the final look of the photograph. 

Well that and trying to make up my mind about how I want my photos to look. 

I thought today I might walk you through my dilemma.  Share with you how I processed one of my recent photos.  Of course, this should go without saying…I’m not a professional photographer.  And there are a million ways of doing things in Photoshop Elements.  Which probably means that I am doing this the absolute hardest way possible (a specialty of mine).

OK then.  Without further adieu, here is the recent photo of my delightful daughter straight out of the camera (SOOC). 

It’s a pretty decent photo (the fact it’s not awesome is an issue with the photographer not the subject).  Not super happy with the focus – would like to have it a little sharper especially around the eyes.  And it’s a little underexposed on her face.  But nonetheless I love her expression and the pretty light and bokeh so we’ll go with this one.

So when I edit most of my photos, the first thing I do is open my JPG image as Camera Raw.  (I guess I should state for the record that I do not shoot in raw).

You can see in the screen shot below that I have a few area with blown out hilites (the red blobs). 

On the Basic tab I took the exposure down by .50 which solved most of that issue (once I crop this photo those other areas won’t be visible).  And then the next step I do on most of my photos is to increase the clarity by +30 and increase vibrance by +20.  I also very slightly increased the saturation to +2.  I like what this did for the background, but I’ll have to fix the lighting on her face later.

Next I went to the Detail tab and I increased the sharpening by 30, and because I shot this photo at ISO 800, I upped the Noise Reduction – Luminance +20 and Color +30. 

OK.  So here is where it gets tricky for me.  I really like the soft light in this photo, but usually I adjust the blacks to get the histogram to extend all the way to the left.  But when I do that, it makes this photo really bold and high contrast.

And I like high contrast, bold photos, but I don’t know…for some reason I just really like the softness before.  So I decided to split the difference.  Then I pulled the photo into the main Elements work space.  My next step was to address the ridiculously minor imperfections on her ridiculously perfect skin.   Then I cropped the photo for a little better composition.

And so now here we are with basic clean edit.

Here they are side by side – SOOC and basic clean edit.

Now for the fun part.  

First I had to address the brightness on her face.  Plus I also added a teeny bit more saturation to the whole image.

Her face still seemed a little dark so I brightened it a little more. Oh and I did a little eye enhancement.  But then there’s the big question…how much contrast.  Here is one option with a Soft Light layer of 100%.  Obviously way too much.

And here is what it looks like with Soft Light at 50%.

I like that.  A little bit of contrast which I think really shows off her pretty hair.

Just for comparison here is the SOOC shot again.

A normal person would say “Looks great.  Move on.”  But not me.  Oh no…I had to keep obsessing experimenting.

Finally after a couple of hours working on this photo, what I realized is that I kept messing around with various options thinking that there would be one perfect edit.  And that’s the lesson for me I think – there’s no one perfect option.  The question to ask is, ‘does this photo tell the story I want it to tell.’

So I sat and thought about it a bit.  And decided the story I would like to tell is that I spent a spectacular fall afternoon in park with my beautiful daughter. 

Yep…this is the one. 

I’d love to know how you go about editing photos.  Do you edit your photos the same way every time? Do you have a particular go-to “style”?  Do you obsess over trying to make things perfect?  Did your cat hack up hairball on your staircase this morning? 

Wait…you don’t have to answer that last one.

Peace, Kelly