Recreate a Portrait

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The next task was to recreate a portrait: it’s lighting conditions, the highlights and shadows, the atmosphere and tone of the picture etc. etc. I chose a dark, shady pic with a chic standing in the middle of it with a haughty, arrogant attitude advertising Fornarina jeans. She stands completely in the shadow excepting four spotlights highlighting her legs, waist pocket and her chest and chin. The picture is a bit lighter in the magazine than the scanned version, so I’ll have to lighten it up a little bit later.

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From the Magazine

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Choosing this picture I started – though not knowing it by then – a series of misfortunes, troubles, headaches and tantrums… or something to that matter. If you assume me to be exaggerating, assume away! I might be..Anyway, trying not to complain the whole page through, there seemed to be some kind of a curse or jinx set to ruin all the efforts to ever get the picture ready and printed, including Neil’s (photography teacher) absences and resignation, the smoking spotlights that scared the crap out of my little helpers (I’m ever so grateful for their patience and guts!!), my leaving the manual focus on ensuing 87 great shots out of focus and finally an iMac crashing and thus destroying my only copy of the ready-to-be-printed picture. Here my friend Saara would comment that iMacs don’t crash and Jaakko (another photography teacher) would remind us all to make backups and backups of backups. I totally agree.

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The shooting

Problems: So on my first two attempts I had people holding three spotlights in the air trying to keep them in the exactly right angle. The pictures came out a little blurry probably for three reasons:

I shot in the dark with little light and therefore had to use a slow shutter speed. The little movements of the model you naturally see in the picture.

I also shot from a distance to fit the model in the frame from head to toe. An individual body part, the face for example, didn’t then have as much pixel information as the face in a close-up would’ve had.

And three: In the second shooting I forgot the manual focus on…

In the end I took the shot with one softbox right in front of the model (a little above her head) and another in the lower left corner, a pretty raw shot as you can see (though once again the original is more exposed than this uploaded one).

The Shot

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Postproduction: All the highlight spots were then made in Photoshop with an underexposed dark layer as a background and a lighter overexposed layer on top of it. The spots were then “drawn” with a brush using a layer mask. I used separate extracted layers for upper and lower body to change the color tones of the clothes, one layer to create the shadows of the face using Curves, one layer to get a nice skin tone for the lighted parts of the face, and yet another layer to hide the ankles into shadow. Finally I had to create two layers for the glove and the fingers to smooth the uneven interface of the upper and lower body layers. I also thought about smoothing the skin on the face, but the skin was already smooth enough and the pictures were taken from a distance so I judged it unnecessary.

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Because the computer crashed and destroyed my first edited image, I had to present in the deadline critic an unfinished picture that I had edited in Photoshop only twenty minutes. I’ll show both the 20-minute-picture and the final one side by side so you can judge for yourselves if there’s really any difference between them =)

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20-minute-picture and the final one

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In some ways I like the 20-minute-picture better, though once again remember that these are much darker than the originals. I don’t know why they seem so dark here. In the printed onces you can see much more details and the cap and the other hand aren’t in total darkness like they are here. So you’ll just have to imagine the right effects ’till I’ll have some lighter versions of these.

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