Portrait Photography And Photo Editing Tips – 1

As mentioned in my earlier posts i am a photography learner and here i am sharing my experience of my first Portrait photography shot. I always like baby Photos, its always a pleasure to work with kids and This photograph i have clicked during my very special occssion of my Life

Its not a portrait studio photography, Beautiful little angel in the portrait is my Niece, I have captured her smile while she was enjoying in my wedding ceremonies. Although I have clicked this image in color mode but during post production I have changed the photograph Mode to Grayscale.

As i am not a professional Photographer but recently i have read somewhere about portrait photography that If you want to capture clothes with your camera click with colors but if you want to capture emotions remove colours from your pictures.So that is what happened here, As soon as I remove colors, It becomes a life photo.

So lets have a look at how i have clicked this Photograph

Portrait Photography Tips

DSLR Camera setting for this image is below:

• Camera Mode: Manual
• Aperture: F/4.8
• Shutter Speed: 1/30 s
• ISO: ISO 1000
• Exposure Bias: +2 Steps
• Metering Mode: Pattern
• Focal Length: 125mm
• White Balance Auto
• Flash: Not used
• Location: Indoor
• Lightings: Low lighting with White Tube light
• Time of the day: Evening, near about 8:00 PM

So here are the issues I can see in the original shot.

• Exposure is less, so shutter speed could be reduced to get high exposure (but this is a random click. Sometimes with reducing shutter speed we may get the blurr image as Kid cant hold in same photo pose for much time)
• I increased ISO due to low light which added grains in the photograph (But its on you how you handle grains in post production, you can use noise reduction to smoothen the photograph or you can add more grains in portrait a little vintage look)
• There is a very little blurr in the image, this is because i holded camera in Hand. I could use tripod

Post Production Photography Tips

Here are the things I imagined in my mind to make it a perfect shot.

• I want to remove colors from the photo
• Background on image has one side dark and one side light, so i want to make dark side more darker.
• On the left side of the portrait there are some hair coming out. I am feeling it as distraction so i want to remove those
• Exposure should be more on face to make it a glamour photo
• Complete Noise Reduction

So this is how i did photo editing

• In Adobe lightrooom, Turned the picture into black and white by click B & W in “HSL/Color/B&W” Tab
  • Increased Red, orange and Yellow colors as per need
  • Set rest of the colors to -100
• Using Adobe Lightroom filters, I created a Radial filter on face, and select invert mask so that mask will only affect facial area
  • Set the feather of this photo filter to 54, so that it will give natural effect on the image
  • I increased Exposure and Highlights
  • Also Enhanced some clarity
  • Also Reduced Noise
    
• Now i have created another radial filter around the face. This time not using invert mask as i just want to consider area other than face for editing
  • Set the size and feather of this radial such that this radial filter boundaries overlap with above radial filter
    
  • Reduce Exposure
  • Reduce Contrast and Shadows to -100
• Now Time to remove extra hair. I used radial filter around hair and then used brush option to extend it.
  
  • Reduced exposure and clarity to minimum so that it will blend with background
  • Adjusted Contrast as per need

Now its time to reduce the noise. Although we can reduce Noise using Lightroom too, but when noise grains are more i prefer to edit photo in Photoshop and not Lightroom. So i exported the image into its original raw format and imported in Photoshop.

• I selected Filter > Noise >  Reduce Noise filter
• Its on your personal choice how much Noise/Smoothness you want. Reduction in noise sometime affects details of the photograph. I want image a really smooth one, so i gave preference to smoothness over details.
  • Set strength to 10
  • Preserve details to 0
  • Reduce color noise to 45%

So here we have our final Image

Again the Camera Used for the photography is Nikon D5300, with 55mm-300mm zoom lens

You can have a glance at the camera below:

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