An hour of PP without help of plug-ins.

[BuZzZeRkEr]

Snapped a few test shots to get lighting right for a reception in 2 weeks. I've seen some pretty incredible photos in the professional gallery by use of PS portrait plug ins. I tried to somewhat duplicate the effects without using the plug ins. What I found is that it is very time cosnsuming and I'll have to shell out the $300 to get the plug ins. Or spend countless hours editing hundreds of photos individually.

Here is what I came up with after an hour of PP and still not that excited about it...what do you think?

 

[D-50]

A bit too saturated, her shirt line has obvious processing effects on it, the blur on her face is too much, did you use a glaussin blur, if so I would stay away from that. Also her face lacking sharpness. I do like the light on the hair but again the hair in general is to soft.

 

[miguellara78]

It does not work for me, it looks over processed, kind of looks like it has the wrong wb balance, very soft, definetly not worth 1 hour in front of the monitor.
You might want to try something else.

 

[BuZzZeRkEr]

I concur with both of the above, I should've included that the actual print is B&W for a B&W shoot. The over saturation of reds translates much more fluid than higher frequency blue.

The color proof shows all the holes in my post processing...and the fact it took me an hour AAHHHHH!!!!

I need the pluggins...gotta drop the money, but i'm finding now it's well worth it!!

Oh yeah, here's the final B&W proof (exact same picture), as you can see much harder to see the mistakes...

 

[Judge Sharpe]

much better in B+W too bad her eyes are closed.

 

[BuZzZeRkEr]

much better in B+W too bad her eyes are closed.

Yeah I know!!! I was just testing my Gary Fong inverted dome diffuser and was in almost a completely dark room. I told the model to shake her hair left and right as hard as she could to see what is the lowest shutter speed I can get with a f/2.8 without getting any motion blur.

It's funny, when you tell a model to shake their heads back and forth to make their hair flop around.....all of them close their eyes. Probably cuz they don't want their hair hitting them in cornia . Well this shot was only intended to manual adjust camera levels, but I kinda liked this one for some reason (in B&W of course)