Re: How to achieve this beautiful softness? (NSFW)

The softness of the skin and the model comes from great makeup, lighting, and retouching. All the shadow/highlight transitions across the face and body are incredibly smooth. This comes from the combination of a large light source and...

Re: How to: "Christian Schmidt" Look

Just gave this look another shot, using the following process:

For the sky--

Channel Mixer layer, set to Monochrome, (R-100%, G-0%, B-0%) set to Multiply blending mode

Mask out everything...

Re: RetouchPRO LIVE with Amy Dresser



Ah, working now. Nevermind ...

Re: RetouchPRO LIVE with Amy Dresser

I keep receiving the following message:

This Webinar is not yet open to attendees. Please come back at the scheduled time below.
RetouchPRO LIVE with Amy Dresser
Saturday, November 7, 2009 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM CST

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he

http://michaelbonnerphoto.com/images/IMG_8958_Edit.jpg

2 Umbrellas left & right, Softbox high center for fill

All the heavy lifting in PS was done by curves layers and D&B on softlight/overlay layers

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



"Good" is subjective. If you ask their respective clients, I'm sure you'd hear equally glowing appraisals of their work. It all depends on what you're aiming for. Same goes for Fiscus. If you mean smoother and...

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



The only reason I can see for using it is that if you had a photo where there was some color bleed into the dark shadow tones, it'd improve the "clean" look of the photo and the apparent contrast....

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



I'm pretty sure desaturating the blacks is exactly what it sounds like- taking everything black (or, in actuality, near-black) and taking all the color information out of it.

Try going into Select > Color...

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



Well there's saturation and color control too, as well as a whole lot of sharpening. Besides that, though, half the reason why you don't see a bunch of people doing it is because everyone wants a shortcut.

...

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



Certainly- the vast difference here is the excellent compositing being done here - sky, mountains, road, asphalt chips. All that stuff is painstaking to get right and necessary to turn a studio shot into a believable composite....

Re: Skin Tone Color-Swap in Curves


Awesome! Thanks so much- I can't wait to get into PS and try this!...

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



It really is. The overall appearance of smoothness comes from the simplification of tonality transitions. Texture is only visible when it interrupts the path of light and creates shadowed areas. That's why the pixel-level...

Re: Skin Tone Color-Swap in Curves

Awesome info, Steve! Thanks for sharing- I may have to invest in a pen with more than two buttons now.

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he

Here's a much larger file with the before and after. As I said before, this photo is not lit properly- there are three soft light sources in here versus the five light setup that's been discussed earlier in this thread. I was simply trying...

Re: The demystification of dave hill! let's all he



For someone so familiar with the properties of low-resolution JPEGs, I'm surprised at your analysis. The quality/size compromise to upload the image to RetouchPro is the main problem. Here's the photo on my website in a...