Thursday, February 19, 2009

Photographing The Human Face - Minimizing Wrinkles!

By Dan Eitreim

Weekend shooters and pros alike all have one major task when doing portrait photography, make your subject look like a million bucks. And do it without using a lot of obvious retouches. Easy to say, hard to do.

A number of repairs and improvements can be done in Photoshop, but unless you are a true master at retouching, it's hard to do too much without ruining the portrait. The more problems that you fix "in the camera" the better off you will be and the easier it will be to get seamless retouches.

This first tip concerns acne and wrinkles.

Adults are concerned with wrinkles and teens worry about acne and other facial blemishes. It's a fact of life. Your models won't say anything about it, but they expect you to know how to lessen their appearance.

Adults. The deeper and darker our wrinkles, the older we look. It happens to all of us eventually. If we can lighten or even eliminate our wrinkles, we look younger. Fortunately, this is a problem that is easy to fix.

Let's first examine - What is a wrinkle? it's a small crevice, defined visually by the shadow at the bottom. The older we get, the deeper the wrinkle, the darker the shadow. It's a 1-2-3 progression. The darker the shadow, the older we appear to be. So, how do we take years off our models?

Lessen the shadows.

What makes the shadows? Light that is skimming the face from the top or side and unable to penetrate to the bottom of the wrinkle. The harder and more intense the light, the darker the shadows which visually adds years to our appearance.

To make your model look younger, have your light shining directly into their face. This way the light is able to get into the "bottom" of the wrinkle. The wrinkles are filled with light which lessens their shadow effect and the years drop off dramatically. The time spent in Photoshop does too!

Teens with acne? Same thing. Acne, acne scars and other facial blemishes are at least partially defined by shadow. So, we handle it the same way we dealt with wrinkles, avoid hard, skimming side or top light. Use light directly aimed into the face and pimples and other scars will be visually minimized.

In addition to the sun, use your on camera flash or a reflector of some sort to fill in the shadows. Your smooth faced teens and young looking adults will thank you.

Now you are ready to go out and make some money with your camera. To learn how easy it is, check out the links in my resources box... - 16651

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