Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

[nspadoni]

Hey guys.

So I have been struggling to get some nice glowy skin in my shootings lately. The makeup artists I work with are getting better and better in achieving the look, but it still bugs me of how much could I make a skin glow in post/retouching.

I'll post below some examples of what I have and where I'd wanna get. Black and white is my stuff, color are my references.

Is it "simply" a matter of getting the beauty done properly (highlighting, oiling etc.) or are the retouchers able to give this glowy, oily, highlighted look to a skin somehow?

Thanks all!

[klev]

Re: Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

Some of these might have been accentuated after the fact, but it's usually unnecessary and almost always looks worse. Typically makeup and lighting creates some bright spots in certain areas like the forehead and nose. The overall image can still look washed out when examining the raw files You would typically get the brightness right over the larger areas so that they don't look washed out. If you want these brighter highlights, you should be able to leave them as they are. Just avoid toning them down.

I base this on having looked at a lot of raw unretouched image files, where the lighting alone was sufficient to produce this sort of thing.

It looks like they're using fairly large lights, even if they aren't that close to the subject. Overall this applies to the first, fourth, and fifth. The third looks absolutely terrible as that streak looks unnatural. I'm also not that fond of the second.

[skoobey]

Re: Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

Focus on getting the density right.

[shumicpi]

Re: Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

You can create glossy skin in photoshop increasing highlights using curves, adjusting your highlights' strength and color. Then, refining your mask. Like many other techniques in Photoshop, there many different ways of doing it. But the idea I have tell you is quick yet very effective and has the advantage of being quite easy to refine to get a precise result.

[Sabrina81]

Re: Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

Try baby oil or Pam (cooking oil spray in a can).

[Shoku]

Re: Achieving a glossy skin in beauty photography

Is it "simply" a matter of getting the beauty done properly (highlighting, oiling etc.) or are the retouchers able to give this glowy, oily, highlighted look to a skin somehow?

This can be done in camera with proper lighting and oiling (oiling can be optional).

Remember the angle-of-reflectance? The more acute the angle of light upon the subject the brighter the reflectance will be from the camera's perspective, which means a kicker light can be 1/4 the power of the key light and can look up to 5 times brighter at the camera.

So using correct light set-up is the first step in achieving this look in camera. Large soft lights create smoother/softer reflections if they are close to the subject. Harsh lights create hard reflections and their brightness is based on distance to the subject and amount of power used.