I spent last weekend doing senior pictures for a couple of guys. It was a first for me, so I'd love to get some feedback from the collective here. :-) You're not going to hurt my feelings, so have at it.

Any glaring posing issues that I can keep in mind next time?
Any issues with post-processing that should be fixed now?

Thanks!

A1.


A2. He was homecoming king the day before, so he hung on to the crown and cape.


A3.


A4.


A5.


A6. He also just got a new car and we did a few with that.


C1.


C2.


C3.


C4.


C5.


C6. He's big into trap shooting - this probably isn't even half of his medals.

Hi, I'm not pro so take my feedback with a grain of salt.. A1 & A2 could use some fill flash or shadows/highlights might help bring detail out of the shadows. If you haven't tried "Portraiture" yet you are missing a great program that would help his skin a LOT. http://imagenomic.com/pt.aspx

A4 - crop the north and west sides to make the bricks more uniform. Clone out the black spot on the one brick or include it in your crop because it's distracting.

A5 - I might have asked him to stand about 3-4' away from the wall and used fill flash to prevent the shadow.

I love A6, that's a great shot...

C2 - Fill flash might help the facial shadows, but it's a good shot even without it.

C3 - Great shot again, maybe the left shoulder could have been included. Nice bokeh. Rule of thirds might be off by a whisker but I like it anyhow.

C4 - A Pro shot all the way but try selective "Portraiture" on his face, masking the rest of shot.

C5 - Too much brick, not enough lower body.

C6 - Great shot! (No pun intended). Very creative here.

Thanks rstone, that's very helpful. I think I'll take your advice on some of these (the ones I can!) and I'll also check out Portraiture. From your link, it looks like it mainly does skin smoothing? I'm never sure how far to take those things, but a very slight amount shouldn't hurt anything, I would guess. :-) Thanks!

Originally Posted by jhofker Thanks rstone, that's very helpful. I think I'll take your advice on some of these (the ones I can!) and I'll also check out Portraiture. From your link, it looks like it mainly does skin smoothing? I'm never sure how far to take those things, but a very slight amount shouldn't hurt anything, I would guess. :-) Thanks!

Portraiture is awesome. You can run it so the changes are made on a separate layer wich you can then adjust the opacity to pull back some of the effects. I usually run it at about 50% opacity.

HOWEVER, I recommend you keep the skin smoothing in serious check with males. Honestly, I opt for healing out larger blemishes with the healing brush rather than opting for skin smoothing.

Also, even though I HATED the older version I had, I finally tried out the newer release of Portrait Professional - cheaper than Portraiture, and just as easy to use, especially as the PS plug-in that you can run on a layer in Photoshop. As Alex says, go light, light, lighthanded (particularly on men), but it can be a great timesaver and sometimes can do fixes that are really tough to do manually in PS. (ZOomer and Bryce, I'm glad you guys kept going on and on about it - despite my reservations, it prompted me to check out the newer release which is SO.MUCH.BETTER. than the one I had and which I actually really like).

I think there's a sale on it too - might end today (9/30), but worth a look?