Adding a catchlight (specular highlight) can help draw attention to the subject’s eyes. If you want to get the catchlight in the eyes of your subject let him/her look at something bright.
Then you can enhance it in photoshop with dodge and/or burn tool.
If you want to enhance the sharpness of your photos in Photoshop you can find the well known filter ‘unsharp mask’, but there is also another useful sharpening technique named high pass. This is the method:
In this way you’ll get more contrast on the image’s edges and more sharpness.
If you want a lot of fine details use the ‘unsharp mask’, if you want pop out the surface from the background use ‘high pass’ method. But remember…a shot out of focus remain a shot out of focus.
No money for a book to exibit to your possible costumers? All you need is some sheets of thin pasteboard where fasten your better photos and a box to collect them. About the colors of the sheets choose what you prefer, sure white, black and some different colors more suitable for your pictures.
Cut a sheet for every picture and cut them some inches more bigger than your photo prints. So you’ll have a coloured frame and the space for an eventual title or caption. Obviously I hope your prints are enough large to be admired.
Choose a nice box where collect them and you’ll have an elegant photo portfolio! Moreover easily updatable…;)
When you are to crop off a picture involving legs or arms it’s a good rule don’t crop at a joint to avoid ‘amputation’ effect. Do crop either above or below the joints.
To achieve a white background, it’s not enough to have a white backdrop. You need a backlight. This is a lamp placed behind the subject and adjusted to illuminate just the background. You achieve white only by correctly adjusting the brightness of this lamp. If non-adjustable as to intensity, you must use distance as the basis for the adjustment.
You need to light the background quite brightly but it’s diffucult to achieve a uniform white with a simple lamp. This uniformity can only be obtained using a “broad” source as outputted by a bank of highly diffused lamps.
The rule is get 2-3 stops more light on the background than on the subject, metering and exposing for the subject, of course.
Obviuosly you have to care the subject lighting, too: First the “fill” lamp: draw an imaginary line between subject and camera lens. The line passes through the camera lens and beyond. Your “fill” lamp should be situated as close to this line as possible. Place “fill” to shine on the subject, off to the side only enough to avoid obstructing the cameras view. If behind the camera, position off to the side just far enough to avoid casting camera shadow on subject.
Place “Main” high and off to side, turn off “fill” while adjusting position of “main”. Watch subject’s shadows as you move the “main” for effect. Remember, “main” must be brighter than “fill” therefore closer.
Another way to get white background is use photoshop or other editing programs. You have to mask off your subject and use levels to “bring up” the back drop.
Before long the step by step workflow.
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