Re-enactment (part 4) Perfectionist

I am very much a perfectionist, when it comes to my photography. Little things matter and even now I look at the image and see tiny things which get me frustrated (in fact I have gone back once after seeing a couple and re-edited).

With this post though I will show you three images. One, straight out of camera, the second after my first edit in Capture One Pro and the third the one above, after the final edit.
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Straight out of camera

As you can see, this photo is perfectly useable. Give it a few tweaks and I would have a very nice image but many say that ‘nice’ is boring and in this case, there is a lot more that can be done to make this image stand out.

With this photo, I made a couple of small changes, from the previous image. The setup is the same but I changed my tunic.

There is a big difference with the two tunics. If I was shooting in colour, the red would easily be preferable but, with the black and white, where I play around with reds, to give more shadow, around the face, this also effects the tunic. So I put on one of my other tunics. This had advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was I was much more free to play around. The disadvantage was I didn’t quite fit this tunic as well and I would have to darken it in post production. One thing also to notice, is you can seem y trousers, now this isn’t a big thing and easily hidden in the final edit, it is a little thing, that still bugs me.

Now I made various changes in Capture One Pro. C1P, is where I do the major editing of a photo. I then export it as a PSD and do the final tweaks in Photoshop. Playing around in C1P is quite fun but doing detailed work in Photoshop, is nothing but a pain. It does make a difference though.

As, you can see, the basis of the final image is created her. But getting the details right is a big thing, playing around with shadows and light. Looking at the image, at different sizes to see what stick out and then correcting it, all make a difference to the final image.

The final edit took around two hours and I probably could have spent more time on the photo but when is enough enough. This is always the question and at some point you have to stop.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these post. and they are of some use.