LightningPaul

This cute and lovely Dutch girl was on her way to a party. She was so originally and cool dressed that I had to ask her if I could take a picture. Luckily she happily agreed. Enjoy!

UPDATE: submitted for VFXY theme Fancy.


TECH-INFO: The original shot image was good I wanted to tweak it a bit. So in Photoshop I used 14 masked adjustment layers, all curves, brightness/contrast, HSL, vibrancy and selective color tools. The main parts were the window, the wall, the floor and the model. On the model I did separate enhancements regarding the face, eyes, gold colored and non-gold colored clothing.
The processing gives it a bit harder feeling which reminds my of some analog images.

I'm currently also experimenting with a new self made contrast preset. Therefore I make an adjustment layer of the curves tool. I set the blend mode to luminosity instead of normal. Otherwise you don't only enhance the contrast but also the saturation. I boost the contrast of the RGB channel using a traditional S-curve. The blue channel gets an inverse S-curve. On the red channel I take the middle of the contrast line and pull it slightly down so that the middle red tones get darker.

I used the same technique, but in a very mild way, on this image of Celine. Of course I'll try that on more portraits soon.