Skin work - David Contreras Photography

Been playing around with this process for a while and I think I got it to where I'm comfortable using it every time and explaining it.

So here it is in its major steps.

In order to get a good beauty shot, it's important to have all the proper ingredients; Good model with good bone structure* and really good skin, a good photographer with good lights and camera that knows how to use them, really good MUA and finally a good post process workflow that will help enhance the final image. It's almost like baking a multi layered cake with the PP being the frosting.

* I tend to prefer thin models for beauty. Even though you won't necessarily shoot their body, their necks are usually thinner and the cheek bones tend to be more visible.

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David > Step 1. Model/Light/MUA/Photographer

Here is Jeramee Lopez. She probably has the best skin I have ever seen. You really need to see it in person to believe how beautiful her skin is. It is absolutely perfect but the high resolution and sharpness of my camera makes it look worse than it is.

My MUA is also really amazing as well and I try to use her at every chance I get. She's one of the few MUAs that I know that hand mixes the foundation color to match the model's skin tones and then applies it with an airbrush so it is very even across the face and neck. This pays off much later while post processing. She also uses make up that works well with studio lights.

For the lighting, I used my standard Beauty dish light set up. Beauty dish directly above about 2 feet from the model, reflector underneath to create "clamshell" lighting. Behind on either side are two softboxes with grids rim lighting the subject. I usually set the BD at F16 and the rear lights at about F16 or 1/3 to 1/2 stop below that.

David > Step 2: Lightroom

My next step is to run it through lightroom to get the "look" I want. I don't have an exact procedure with this because it changes with every photo. Usually I just start playing around with the sliders until I get something that I'm happy with. Or I'll look a other photos for inspiration and try and match thee "look" as best as possible. For this pic, I decided to go with something cooler and a bit more unnatural. As you can see from the pic above, she has naturally tan skin so I wanted to do something that made her look different.

David > Step 3: Liquify/Healing Brush/Portraiture

The first thing I'll do with any image is make a copy of the original layer so that I can compare my edits.

I usually start of with the liquify tool to reshape the face the way I want. I'll hit the major bumps first, the things that look the most awkward. In this case I brought down the bump on the back of her neck and thinned her neck a bit on the from and back. You really need to be gentle with this tool because if you over do it, it can look way too obvious. The key here is to be subtle and work in several passes. Even though, the amount of liquify tool used here is minimal, I would say it's about 10-15 min worth of work.
In most cases I will spend a good time reshaping the face, especially around the jaw line.

Next comes the healing brush. I usually will use a very small brush, about the size of small pimple and work over the entire image. Since I use such a small brush, It can be quite time consuming.
For Jeramee's skin, it didn't take too long since her skin is good but I had to spend a considerable amount f time removing the wrinkles in her neck.

Next is the skin. I've experimented with a lot of different ways to clean the skin, some quick and easy, some long and drawn out. The quick and easy ones can work well but can look ameteurish. The long and drawn out processes are great but take a long time to learn and even longer time to edit.. Unless you're getting paid hourly to retouch, I don't recommend it. I personally don't have that kind of time.

I started playing around with the Portraiture plug in a few month back and was intrigued. It seemed to give almost instant results. The key here is "almost". I found that it really destroyed contrast, color and in some cases, made the hair look to unnaturally soft. I played around with the settings a bit to keep contrast color and softness of the original image. The plug in also allows you to mask the skin area so you can preserve the area around the skin. This is a great tool and saves me a lot of time but again, it's not the end all...

David > Step 4: Dodge and Burn

This is by far my favorite but most time consuming part. I got this technique from Amy Dresser. If you're not familiar with her work, I recommend looking her up. In a nutshell, this step brings out the shapes and structure of the face and if done correctly, adds more dimensionality to image to really make it pop.

I start out by creating a new layer and filling it with 50% gray. Then I change that layer to soft light and it basically disappears.

I then choose the burn tool set it to about 5-7% opacity and set to shadows and start painting in the shadow areas. I like to enhance the cheak bones, the areas round the lips, the nostrils, the eyebrows, and even the hair.

I then use the dodge tool and paint in the highlights. Like the top of her cheek bones, parts of the forhead, he inner part of the lips, eyes etc. I can also use this to lighten the dark areas around her eyes and parts of her neck that I couldn't quite fix with the healing brush.

David > Eye detail before Dodge and Burn

Step 1. Model/Light/MUA/Photographer

Here is Jeramee Lopez. She probably has the best skin I have ever seen. You really need to see it in person to believe how beautiful her skin is. It is absolutely perfect but the high resolution and sharpness of my camera makes it look worse than it is.

My MUA is also really amazing as well and I try to use her at every chance I get. She's one of the few MUAs that I know that hand mixes the foundation color to match the model's skin tones and then applies it with an airbrush so it is very even across the face and neck. This pays off much later while post processing. She also uses make up that works well with studio lights.

For the lighting, I used my standard Beauty dish light set up. Beauty dish directly above about 2 feet from the model, reflector underneath to create "clamshell" lighting. Behind on either side are two softboxes with grids rim lighting the subject. I usually set the BD at F16 and the rear lights at about F16 or 1/3 to 1/2 stop below that.