Making of "Touch"

This article is actually a combination of two tutorials--how to set up basic lighting in the studio and how to give a portrait the glossy magazine look.

For taking the shot I used a Canon EOS 40D with a Canon 24-105mm 1:4 L IS USM lens, a large softbox, and a small spotlight (same set-up as for "Dog Tag"). The softbox was placed right next to me and raised to about 1.80m above the ground, while the small spotlight was placed about 50cm above the ground and used to brighten up parts of the black background, thus making it dark gray. You can see the exact arrangement here:



I used the following settings:

• RAW mode
• Focal length: 55mm
• Aperture: f/5
• Shutter speed: 1/250s
• ISO: 100
• White balance: 5900K

And this is the photo I took (by the way, the models are Andrea and Tara from J.I.M. Modelling Agency, Bangkok):



Now let's get rid of the faithful skin color and change it to cool white!

The first step is to open the raw photo in Photoshop. I use Photoshop CS3 because only CameraRaw 4.5 (which works only with CS3) supports RAW files from the 40D and I don't want to disturb my workflow by converting my RAW files with the DNG converter. Anyway, doubleclicking on the RAW file will open a screen that looks like this:


(Click to enlarge)

As you can see, the colors are different from the original shot because I changed the parameters already. The image above shows how I set the parameters in the "basic" section:

• Tint: -1
• Blacks: +5
• Brightness: +50
• Contrast: +25

After that I moved on to the tone curve and changed its parameters to these:



The next step is changing the red primary and green primary parameters in the "camera calibration" section. Reducing the saturation of red and green is the secret key to shiny skin colors:



I didn't change anything else, so I just clicked on "open image" to -- well, open the image in Photoshop and do some final touch-ups. Here's the shot after applying the RAW settings:



To make it even shinier, I had Photoshop auto-adjust the levels by pressing Shift+Command+L (Windows users use Shift+Ctrl+L):



Then I removed the birthmarks and cleaned up minor skin irregularities with the spot healing brush tool (press J to activate this tool). Now the image looked like this:



The final step is using NoiseNinja for removing the noise, smoothing the skin, and increasing sharpness and contrast a bit more. All these things can be achieved by opening the NoiseNinja plugin (Filter -> PictureCode -> Noise Ninja), clicking on "profile image", and change the settings in the "filter" tab to these:

• Smoothness: 14
• Contrast: 15

(Click to enlarge)

If you don't have NoiseNinja I strongly recommend you get it because it will significantly increase the quality of your images, as you can see here:



That's it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial :)

Psst... check out another way of processing this image: http://www.glossyart.com/blog/2008/08/split-toning-tutorial-making-of-dog-tag.html