Portraits are the attempt of capturing the essence, the personality of a person. Of course this is one of the most difficult tasks in photography. And of course there will never be a really satisfying answer to the question how to do that. On the other hand - there are really nice approximations by really good photographers out there.
Shooting portraits means on the one hand that we try to achieve the goal of “portraying a person” in camera. And by influencing light, composition, mood, and interaction with our models we lay the foundations of this work. But there is also the aspect of editing portrait pictures in a way that underlines the character of the portraitee (does that word exist?) and brings out features that we want to emphasise.
For my own portrait shooting I found out that a “one fits it all” editing process doesn’t work. People are so different that using just one editing workflow for all types of portraits does not suffice. So I try to develop one processing workflow for each portrait session that I do. I found out that I need to sit down after the photoshoot, take a close look at the raw material and start playing with the pictures on my computer. It usually takes me some hours to decide how exactly I want to edit the series that I have created.
As many viewers know, I am mainly a black and white photographer, particularly when this is about portrait photography. I find monochrome portraits more expressive. By leaving away color the features and character of a person come out more intensely. This is certainly not a new insight, this question has been discussed for generations.
For my portrait developing process I use mainly 4 tools. I saved and organise my pictures in Lightroom. For conversion from color to black and white I use Photoshop, Silver Efex Pro or, as my latest tool, Luminar AI. (It might actually not be a bad idea to write about Luminar AI a separate article to take a look at what this “intelligent” software is able to accomplish.)
In Photoshop I use mainly solid color adjustment layers for b&w conversion. I find that they give very nice grey tones with soft contrasts that can even be further tweaked by using curves, gradient maps or channel mixer layers. So I use this conversion pathway for pictures where I want to achieve a softer b&w look.
For raw and gritty b&w conversions I use Silver Efex Pro. My favourite preset is Film Noir I which creates strong contrasts with interesting grain. As with all presets this preset is only a starting point and depending on the goal I want to achieve I would change brightness, contrast and amount of grain.
Luminar AI is a new player in the field (at least it is with its new “intelligent” software). Some black and white conversions presets in Luminar are quite usable and the grain is quite pleasing. I also use Luminar if I want to tweak eyes, lips or skin after converting in Photoshop or Silver Efex. Because the Luminar software recognises facial features it is very easy to edit eye expression or darkness of the lips. In some cases the skin correction tool can also replace Frequency Separation (which is a time consuming process to embellish the skin that can be done in Photoshop).
Lina, portrait shoot. This picture is an extreme example for softening the expression by applying blur. This is certainly a matter of taste, you could easily say that the softness is bordering to Kitsch. I heard somebody say that “this is very much 80’s”. I would not disagree…. :-)
After all I find that editing should follow the character of a person that I find during the photo shoot and in the pictures. An example is my recent shoot with Lina in Athens. Lina appeared to be a very delicate character with subtle beauty and expression. Her characteristics lead me to using the “soft” solid color adjustment layer process in Photoshop. I combined that by even adding more softness to the pictures by using Gaussian blur on many parts of the pictures. Applying blur all over the picture and then removing the blur from the face and parts of the body by “painting in black” in Photoshop is the method I am using. (If you have questions about this process, please don’t hesitate to send me a Flickr Mail or write me a message here on the website.)
Processing pictures to enhance their expression and to help telling a story has become integral part of my photography. And I enjoy it, I enjoy reading portraits and trying to find a way of showing the character of a person.