Beauty and the lamp (Patreon)

If you check out the attached images the one called Mo Better Blues (yeah it's an old Spike Lee movie) is a portrait created with the Fresnel lend you see in the image above on the movie.

Whenever I teach lighting I always preach that you should get the lamp close to the model. And when shooting Mo Better Blues and backed up a little I thought it could be fun to create an image with the lamp in the picture so I did.

Both images are shot with my vintage Canon f. 0.95 lens (at f. 1.4). In retrospect it was not the best choice, I would like to have had a bit more depth of field, but we all make mistakes. At least I do.

Lighting is the lamp in the frame, a Hensel 42cm Fresnel spot. It's fitted with a Profoto adapter and here equipped with a Profoto B10 flash - but I'm only using the LED modeling light.

Above is a 30min movie of how I edited the image. I use the actions, and principles from my retouch course, and in case you don't have that the plugin I use for skin tone smoothing is Imagenomic  Portraiture (I'm not affiliated in any way with these guys and don't have any promo codes or anything but it's an absolutely awesome plugin - just a bit hard to figure out which I have fixed in my action).

Anyway if you are interested in the retouch course go check it out, it explains not only how it works, but also why. 

And that will give you a much better understanding of Photoshop. 

If you don't have it look closely at the layers the actions create, and especially the blending modes (the little pop-down which ordinarily says "normal"). 

Enjoy.