Anissa headshots

Did some headshots for a friend that is currently looking for an agent to help book acting jobs in theater and film so I did these for pretty cheap since she could not afford an actual professional portrait photographer. We only shot headshots today and I shot them all with canon 7D and EF 70-200 f2.8 mkII. no fancy lights and didnt have an extra person to hold a reflector so these are completely natural light and no reflected light either which would have been nice to have. i shot these in aperture priority with AWB. these are not intended to be considered professional by any means i just did the best i could. i normally shoot sports. but she wants the to look at natural as possible i guess so that the agents looking at her shots can see what she looks like rather than overly processed perfectly photoshop smooth skin. i bumped the WB slightly to make it warmer because the shots seem a little pale in color in her face skin tones. not sure what editing i should do to make these shots look best possible. they were shot in raw.

here are some that she picked out after we were done that she really liked and wanted slight edits before she got them printed. these are not the edited versions, these are just smaller file size samples.

She has beautiful eyes

agreed lol they also change colors sorta. or they appear to

any suggestions on processing. i dont have a fancy monitor but i want to make sure the skin tones look as good as possible. and im not a very advanced photo editor

I think they look a little harsh. I think a little processing wouldn't hurt.

What photo editing program do you have?

lightroom 3 and 4

and photoshop cs5

what are you suggesting i need to do to process them. what is harsh? not perfect smooth skin? the colors are off? open for suggestions.

im trying to get suggestions on processing these shots or her skin at least. guess i need to post somewhere else

I don't find them harsh at all, maybe the last one needs an exposure tweak, but other than that, I would simply clone out a few of the larger blemishes. Being able to do some minor skin smoothing would be icing on the cake.

yea i have cloned out blemishes on the ones she wanted but not familiar on how to smooth skin and if its honestly needed

Skin smoothing on her forehead of the second image because of the contasty light was were I really noticed it. Using the adjustment brush and lowering the clarity would maybe be worth a try.

cool ill try it thanks

I'm still learning tricks of the trade, so I hope you don't mind me tinkering a bit with the image.

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Aleness wrote in post #14581778
I'm still learning tricks of the trade, so I hope you don't mind me tinkering a bit with the image.

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IMO MUCH better.

Too much skin smoothing the edits
dosen't look natural.

That skin smoothing looks pretty good but i think in this situation its too much for what she is doing with the shots. Thanks for the example