Improving Your Portrait Photography – Eliminate Wrinkles!
Your job as a photographer (whether you’re an amateur or professional) is simple. You have to make your subjects look as good as they’ve EVER looked without your tricks and techniques being obvious. That’s a task easier said than done.
Unless you are a master retoucher or spend countless hours in Photoshop (or both), it’s hard to change too much in a portrait without ruining it. To get seamless retouches, You need to do most of your fixes “in camera”.
This first tip concerns acne and wrinkles.
It won’t take long in your photo career to realize that teens are plagued with acne and adults have wrinkles. They may or may not actually say anything to you about it, but both age groups want to eliminate or at least lessen their respective problems.
Let’s face it, as we get older our wrinkles become more pronounced and actually deeper. Wrinkles are the first photographic signs of our age but they’re a problem that is actually fairly easy to fix.
What defines a wrinkle? It’s the shadows filling in the crevices. As we get older and those crevices get deeper, the shadows become darker and darker. How to get rid of wrinkles and take years off your photographic model?
Lighten the shadow! (There’s a blinding flash of the obvious.)
What creates shadows? It’s light skimming across the face from the sides or the top. The side light is not able to get into the wrinkle crevices and creates a shadow. The deeper the wrinkle, the darker the shadow. This can (and does) add a lot of visual years to our subject.
So, going in reverse, avoid hard side lighting! Pretty simple. By having the light aimed directly into the face, it will penetrate to the bottom of the wrinkles’ crevice and either lighten or totally eliminate the shadow. Obviously giving your model a younger appearance and saving you a lot of time in Photoshop.
Acne? Use the same cure. Acne scars, pimples and other facial blemishes are at least partially defined by the shadows they cast on the face. Again, light skimming the face from the side will cast longer and harder shadows thus making the acne scars more pronounced and pimples appear larger. Shine your light directly into the face and they will be minimized or disappear altogether.
Use a reflector of some sort or even your on camera flash in addition to the sun to fill in the shadows. Your smooth faced teens and wrinkle free adults will thank you.
You now know as much as most professionals! Now it’s time to make some money with YOUR camera! to see how easy this is, follow one of the links to my site…
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February 19th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Most professionals would never do what you propose. Faces aren’t flat. They’re round, so wrinkles and zits conform to the countours of the face and will always cast shadows. Your best bet is a strobe light with a soft box situated either side of the subject or using a ring light.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Thanks for the two options.