{"id":30374,"date":"2021-11-30T02:23:21","date_gmt":"2021-11-30T02:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/blog\/adobe\/a-step-by-step-guide-to-how-i-created-this-portrait\/"},"modified":"2021-11-30T02:23:21","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T02:23:21","slug":"a-step-by-step-guide-to-how-i-created-this-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/blog\/adobe\/a-step-by-step-guide-to-how-i-created-this-portrait\/","title":{"rendered":"A step-by-step guide to how I created this portrait."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In this article, I take you step by step through my process for creating this image featuring the Finnish model Nea Hassinen.<\/p>\n

Setting the mood.<\/h3>\n

As a portrait photographer, I\u2019m always looking for the right setting and mood to match the energy my subject gives off \u2014 and vice versa. Nea Hassinen is a young, up-and-coming Finnish model and she has a specific look that I find deeply compelling. In this case, I was going for an earthy mood for my shoot and her freckles and green eyes felt like a perfect fit.<\/p>\n

How a shoot turns out has to do with more than how a subject looks. The whole time I\u2019m taking photos, I\u2019m trying to get a sense of that person and what they represent. Sometimes you put someone in a certain outfit, surrounding, or atmosphere, and you realize it doesn\u2019t quite fit. Fortunately, this was not one of those times. Nea was right at home in the outdoors, and together we were hunting the sunset in order to capture the really warm, cinematic light seen here.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Before I begin editing a photo, I have to spend time with it, looking for the focus of the image and the details I want to draw out.<\/p>\n

Finding my focus.<\/h3>\n

Before I can edit the image, I have to study it. I study the mood of the lighting and the composition as a whole, along with the colors and individual elements. In this case, Nea\u2019s blonde hair stands out from the green background, so right away I know I\u2019m going to make the background blurry and emphasize the division between the two.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

I do most of my work in Lightroom, where I can quickly and easily play with color saturation and exposure \u2014 two of my favorite tools.<\/p>\n

Pushing the limits.<\/h3>\n

I begin by experimenting in Lightroom, turning the exposure tool all the way down to see where the details and the contrast really start to emerge. I play with the highlights, shadows, and black and white tones, pushing each to their extremes and observing again which details catch my attention \u2014 and how those details affect the overall image. Once I have a feel for all the underlying elements, I revert the image back to its original form.<\/p>\n

Looking at this particular photo, I know I want the green in her eyes and the surroundings to pop since they\u2019re so well matched. I also love the ethereal mood the color emits. I go to the settings in HSL\/Color to experiment with the green hue before increasing the saturation. Right away I know I want to give the bokeh (or blur) more color, so I increase the image\u2019s overall saturation further. Doing so not only brings out the blues and greens in the background, but the contrasting glow of her blond hair as well.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

I am constantly playing with shadow. I love the cinematic, evocative mood it conjures in my work. This image is no exception.<\/p>\n

Playing with darkness.<\/h3>\n

With the colors in place, I return again to those basic light tools \u2014 highlights, exposure, and shadows \u2014 and begin darkening the image once more. This time I\u2019m not looking to unearth any details as much as I am trying to finesse the ones I already have. Typically, this means darkening the image and then increasing the contrast to really emphasize divisions \u2014 in this case the one between Nea\u2019s head and the background. These divisions are part of what creates that cinematic feel I\u2019m always striving for.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

As much as I love color, I\u2019m equally drawn to the work of greats like Peter Lindbergh. This means no matter how attached I am to an image in its color form, I will always see what it looks like in black and white.<\/p>\n

Stripping away color.<\/h3>\n

At this point, I have the focus, lighting, and details all in place. Now comes the time to try it out in black and white. Sometimes it works, with the settings I have, to just select the \u201cmonochrome\u201d profile in the basic editing panel, transforming the image with a single click. In this case, I used my own preset that really brings out the clarity and structure of an image.<\/p>\n

Once I apply my preset, I use the adjustment brush to brighten her eyes, really establishing them as the focus of the image. I brighten her freckles and the delicate plants using the same tool. With that out of the way, I again make sure to clearly divide the subject from the background, once more using tools like the brightness, contrast, and exposure sliders. Another tool I like is the black and white mixer, which allows me to adjust the white in every color of the image. I\u2019ve been known to use this B&W mixer to turn the sky completely white in order to make my subject practically jump out of the frame.<\/p>\n

Stepping back.<\/h3>\n

Knowing when a photo is done is always difficult for me. Sometimes I need an entire day with one photo before I\u2019m really happy with it, at which point I force myself to leave it alone and come back and look at it with fresh eyes later. That said, I always feel like my best editing happens when the shoot is still fresh in my mind.<\/p>\n

In this particular shoot, I didn\u2019t end up using Photoshop. I simply work faster in Lightroom when it comes to lighting, saturation, and all those basic editing functions. That changes when I need to do some major skin retouching or stamp out a distracting feature, at which point I can simply right click inside of Lightroom on an image and select \u201cEdit in Photoshop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another reason I turn to Photoshop is to play with perspective. In this image, I used the pucker tool within the liquify filter to make the head and upper body smaller and the legs longer. The result is a slightly more surreal photo than I was able to achieve simply by getting my camera as low to the ground as possible. Photoshop is also where I go to deepen shadows, which I do using a luminosity mask, or achieve a really great vintage feel using the gradient map feature.<\/p>\n

Drawing inspiration.<\/h3>\n

I find inspiration from a lot of different portrait photographers whose styles sometimes appear at odds with each other \u2014 at least on the surface. I\u2019ve spent a lot of time studying Chi Modu\u2019s work and the way he captured hip-hop icons like Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., along with Peter Lindbergh\u2019s timeless black and white images. Alessio Albi and Marta Syrko are both incredible at capturing the warmth I\u2019m always looking for in my own work.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s anything that ties these photographers together, it\u2019s the intimacy they\u2019re able to capture and create \u2014 an intimacy I\u2019m always searching for, even when my love of the extremes means my images end up edging toward abstract art.<\/p>\n

Check out Adobe\u2019s guide to portrait photography for more on the rules of portrait photography \u2014 and how best to break them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Source : Adobe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this article, I take you step by step through my process for creating this image featuring the Finnish model Nea Hassinen. Setting the mood. As a portrait photographer, I\u2019m always looking for the right setting and mood to match the energy my subject gives off \u2014 and vice versa. Nea Hassinen is a young, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30380,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30374\/revisions\/30380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}