Business Portrait On-location Photo Shoot (behind-the-scenes & Photoshop) Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

So we're on our way to a shoot at a car
dealership. I was hired to take pictures
of all of the employees there for their
website. So I'm bringing my
5D Mark III, and what do you have there, Tony?
-this is the backup camera it's a 5d mark
II
and you have the 70-200 which is perfect for
headshots.
This is a 24-105 the nice Sigma f/4 and
again it's just a back up, we shouldn't ever
need this.
We also don't plan to use the flash, but
if everything else fails if that Cyber
Commander fails to trigger the strobes.
we can use the optical slaves from the
flash here.
-It's always good to have a back-up, plan
on something failing.
So we're going to load up our car here
and just tell you what here we're bringing as
we load it up.
This is our large Paul C. Buff
collapsible soft box so that will give a
nice diffused light if there isn't
adequate lighting in the dealership.
-This is the Paul C. Buff Einstein E-640
which will attach to that soft boxe,
this will be our main light. Here I have just a
bracket on the stand, it's just useful to
have one of these, you can attach
anything to it.
-These are our Vagbond Mini by Paul
C. Buff and they're batteries to hook our
strobes up to/
-That way we don't have to attach or have power
cords running everywhere where people
might trip over it, it's a little easier
outside of the studio.
This is a reflector and we have
diffusers inside as well.
Getting pretty crowded in there. -And this
is going to be a hair light or
background light as we need it, just a
second light. It will be triggered by the
Cyber Commander just like that Einstein
light and will run it from the other Vagabond.
-I was told there would be a nice
background there but you're never sure,
we didn't scope out the place yet so I
was going to use the white side of this
backdrop in case their background wasn't
very appealing.
Throw that in there. I also brought a
lint brush just to make sure everyone is
nice and clean.
I have some painters tape to mark the
spot where everyone can stand so that
everyone's in the same location. And... some tape to hold the backdrop
against the wall. -And this is a Panasonic
GH2 on a tripod, this is just going to be
a b-roll camera for the
behind-the-scenes. The GH2 is a micro
four thirds camera and it's a little bit
old now but records great 1080p video
and it runs forever, it doesn't shut off
after 30 minutes like most DSLRs do.
-I think that's it.
We just have to grab our coats and head
out.
-Let's go.
-Alright.
You might be able to find an angle where
we could get this line of cars in it,
we have to stand up a little bit to look
down but we might be able to do that.
-I was thinking this is a little too
colorful.
-Yeah it is. You want to do it in my office then?
-I have that, the other side is white. -yeah
the wall might be easier,
I don't know how much room there is in there.
-yeah
-The one other thing for this Tony, is that
we don't have the nice natural light.
-Yeah the lightning is, uh... rough.
-We'll have to use this..
-it's a little tight to bring
lighting in.
And I think we'll just have one of us
stand behind him with the reflector
-Yeah, I think it'll be easy, so let's get one more,
I'll get my settings I'll put a mark on
the floor and we'll get it done.
You guys ready? Yeah will you be my model
one more time?
So I'm really glad that we picked a spot
that has natural light because a lot of
the people here are different heights
and I would have had to adjust the
softbox with every different person, it
would have been a lot more set up. So my
recommendation for you would be to look
for natural light and bring a flash
for fill light. -But be prepared in case it
doesn't work out and you have to have
artificial light. One of the reasons we
picked the 5D Mark III for this job is it
takes two memory card slots and it can
write to both cards simultaneously.
That way if one of the cards has a
problem we have another copy and we
don't have to go back and reshoot
everything.
Yeah there you go.
I didn't think that it was the best I
could have done, I would have
preferred if they came into the studio. I mean I know that that wasn't possible.
So now I'm back in my office and i've
uploaded my pictures.
I'm going to show you how to sort
through them, rate them and even edit
them. Now that I have my photo in
Photoshop, I'm going to start by cleaning
up my subject's skin. So I have a filter
called portraiture and I love it and it
does a really good job. It smooths out the
skin without taking away all the pores,
which can kind of leave people looking a
bit lifeless and doll-like. So i'll zoom in a
bit more on his face so I can see
exactly what Portraiture is doing.
I don't want to lose any of these fine
lines or anything like that because it
would make him look unnatural.
So you can see, I can up the threshold
here and it smooths them out way too much.
Looks like a boudoir shot or something
and this is a professional photo so he's
definitely not going for that. These
sliders here control the details. So this
would control the large details and
smooth it out less if you were to bring
them down and I actually think that looks
pretty good.
Let me turn down the fine details a bit so
play around with it, it's definitely to
taste. And my only suggestion would be to
not smooth out people skin too much.
Not even women.
If you notice any residual marks,
you can see there are a few just little
pores you can leave them in and use
other tools in Photoshop to take care
of that. So i'm satisfied with this for
now and then i'll zoom in and use my
other tools to take care of any other
small imperfections. So I want my spot
healing brush and i use my left bracket.
I don't want to remove too many things
because once again it will look just too
unnatural and smooth.
I think that looks pretty good the one
other thing I'm going to do is in person
I didn't see that his brow is furrowed at
all so I'm going to take the little
furrow out of his brow. And I'll just
use my lasso tool,
circle it, delete and then use content
aware fill, that usually does a good job.
And then use Ctrl D to deselect the area.
I like to just zoom in to make sure it
looks natural and that actually doesn't
look too great. So I'm gonna try it again.
That looks much better.
The next thing I'm going to do is just brighten
his teeth a little bit. They look great,
they are nice and white, but we're used to seeing
very white teeth in in the media so it's
nice to just kind of brighten them up a
tad bit.
And here i added a new layer and i use
the overlay layer
I select my paintbrush and use bright
white.
You're going to think this looks insane
but you just fill in just the front
teeth.
This is really bright, but once i'm done
i'm going to turn down the opacity and
it will look natural.
We'll see
I don't want to whiten them them too much.
So I'll zoom out and make sure it looks natural.
You can even turn down your opacity on
your brush a little bit it to get these
back teeth, but remember that the back
teeth are usually a bit darker, so if you
make these really bright,
let me show you what I mean.
I can't really because i have the
opacity down, but if you make these too
bright it won't look good.
Ok.
So the teeth look nice and next I'm
going to just brighten his eyes a tad bit.
So i'll use my Dodge tool, I have the
mid-tones selected and my exposure down
to thirty percent and I just do a little
half circle.
Let me see
And the next thing I'm going to do here,
just because he has
fair skin is just fill in his eyebrows a
little bit. They're in the midtones, so I
have the mid-tone selected and my
exposure is really low, it's only sixteen
percent, and i'm just going to define
them a little bit.
Lastly I'm going to brighten up the
background.
I'll do that by selecting the background
and i'm going to use
let's see, I think I'll use my magic wand tool
to fix the areas that it's selected that
I don't want selected I can use this
tool to subtract from the selection but
I usually like to press alt, the alt key,
and then it does it for you.
You can also use this button here to add to the
selection, but i'm actually going to use
layer masks and i'll show you how. If you
aren't great at selecting by hand, you can
also use the mask tool which i think is
easier. So i'm going to show you how to
select the background better using the
mask tool. So i will go to the
brightness and contrast and i'm going to
raise the brightness of the background,
you can see i missed a big chunk, but
that's not a big deal because then I can
go into the mask and use my paintbrush
with either black or white to add or
subtract to the selected area. So white
is going to add to the selected area, so I
will make my brush bigger by pressing
the right bracket and then just paint it
in.
And I selected the wrong
parts here, so i'll use black to get rid
of that.
So you can see this is the before and it
still looks natural just a bit brighter
and better and this is the after.
Since they're professional photos, you
don't want them to look too glamorous or
touched up that can actually be
embarrassing if they're going to be
meeting with a client and in their
picture
they look 40 years younger, that's going
to be off-putting to the client.
So make sure that it looks like they
look in real life but just the best
version of themselves.
That's it, pretty simple! If you like this
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