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Photography Portrait shots on a white background

Feb 27, 2016

    1. I've been trying to brush up on my photography and image editing skills, and I think I may have finally gotten the hang of it. There are two issues I've been struggling with though:

      1) Stray hairs. They're extremely visible on white backgrounds, and I have tried the trick with water to help smoothen out some of them. But this doesn't really work 100% because they'll reappear each time you move the dolls' head, or when the water dries up. Is there anything else I can do aside from using wax?

      [​IMG]

      2) Pale dolls. I have a DoD The-B who's extremely pale and it's really difficult to edit his pictures to look natural. For example, I have this photo here post-processing:

      [​IMG]

      His face appears to be much too washed out. :( I did try to add a little bit of color to this other photo here:

      [​IMG]

      Which makes it look better, but I think it's still a little off. =/ This is also a problem when I'm attempting a group photo; his skin tone is too much of a difference compared to the rest of my crew who have more yellow tint to their skin.

      Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to take or edit pictures of pale dolls so they'll look more natural?

      Lastly, some critiques on the photos will be nice! I'm still learning, and these are my first attempts at this type of photos. :)
       
    2. Stray hairs. If the wig is washable, you can smooth a little conditioner on your hands and onto the wig to glue those flyaways down. It does need to be a washable wig as the conditioner will keep hold of any stray dust and go pretty claggy over time. If you don't want to do that and have Photoshop (and the patience to mess about in it) you can get rid of stray hairs in post processing with the clone stamp or healing brush tools.

      As for photographing white skin dolls, hm. You will never get it to look the same colour as your normal skin dolls as it just isn't. You have to live with that. The most you can do is try to reduce the light falling on the light doll, to make it look slightly darker and prevent it from becoming a glowing, white ghost. You could do this by making sure the pale ones are the furthest away from your source of light, so they get lit the least. You could also try flagging your lightest doll (so, hold a big piece of dark card so that it shields the doll a little from the light).

      You also need to be careful with your exposure, if you have a variety of skin tones. I would expose for the lightest skin (so, underexpose overall) to avoid that blowing out and going all glarey. You would underexpose by using the manual mode on your camera and adjusting shutter speed (or aperture, depending on taste) until the exposure is just below what it should be. You can also use exposure compensation to bring it down a stop or two (see your camera manual for how to do that).Again, if you have Photoshop, you can adjust the exposure selectively in post processing and brighten the darker dolls by using a layer mask and the levels or curves functions. You can't darken a glowing, white ghost successfully, hence my suggestion for slightly underexposing overall.

      Another thing I find helps with white skinned dolls is to make sure the light is soft, so you don't get glaring hotspots and bleach out all the detail. Do this by using indirect natural light or using some sort of diffusing material over your artificial light. It looks as though these might be taken with a flash. This isn't ideal as it does tend to bleach out detail and leave you with few shadows, if it is the camera's onboard flash. This makes the face look flat. You can put a sheet of white paper in front of the flash to turn it into a larger light source (so you get softer shadow and highlight edges. Always handy with glarey surfaces) and scatter the light, which makes the shadows less dense. I would experiment with using natural light or desk lamps, so you can get some more interesting shadows going and have more control over where your light falls.

      Overall, these are nice. A really good start. There are lots of things you can experiment with. Good luck and enjoy it!

      There are many, many tutorials for all the Photoshop stuff that I have thrown at you. Just Google the key words.
       
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    3. The easiest way is using Photoshop afterwards. There are many tutorials how to, but basically a clever use of Selection Tool, Clone Stamp tool, Blur and Smug will be enough.
       
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    4. Thank you so much! This is really great help. :)

      I've been wanting to get some kind of diffusion for my lights (I'm using a pair of rechargeable LED desk lamps), but haven't gotten around to it yet. Will have to make a note to pick up something this weekend.

      I'm just using a normal digital camera though (Sony TX30); didn't want to invest on a DSLR until I'm absolutely sure that I will be putting it to good use. It probably doesn't have settings for shutter speed or aperture --I know it has a mode that does it automatically, will have to read through the manual again, but I'm guessing post-processing will help here.

      One last question! Would you suggest positioning the lights at a higher angle, or somewhat leveled with the dolls' faces?
       
    5. Having the light at lens level or near to, as you have, leaves no shadows. This can look flat. There are many portrait lighting styles out there. I did a low down on the most common ones here. All can be achieved with a single lamp. Adding a reflector (piece of white card) is optional, but will help.
       
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    6. Your dolls are lovely! Awesome photography as well!