Please help me with editing my first headshot session

This guy is an opera singer, and needs some very professional and "formal" head shots.

I've never edited before, and my partner did the shooting. How is this for a head shot edit/
Please note that I am by nature a High-Contrast, love blacks and gritty looks type of post processor so I'm having serious withdrawal having to be conservative.

Is it to flat?
To grey?

Yes his eyes are naturally different.

For my mind, the crop makes his head feel small - he's clearly a bigger bodied guy - what about a crop that trims out his chest and the dead space above and around his face and gets much tighter on him?

Agreed. The crop is no bien. You definitely need a bit more contrast.

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Do you think it looks a bit yearbookish?

Took a quick shot at it. Could probably get a better B&W conversion from the color image.

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Hows this one, a little better?

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The second one is much better. The B&W is still a little bit bland though.

Do you suggest just + contrast or do a + exposure + blacks and a hint of fill light to bring back lost detail in jacket and the hair?

Post them in color so we can get a better feel of how the original looked

Drakeskakes wrote in post #11041350
This guy is an opera singer, and needs some very professional and "formal" head shots.

Can you tolerate an honest critique?

In my opinion these are neither professional nor formal. Rather than waste time trying to edit these photos I would offer a reshoot.

1. The camera was positioned much lower than the subject's face resulting in "up the nose" shots which are never flattering. No amount of editing can fix that; the camera needs to be positioned at the appropriate height.

2. This is related to the first problem. Since the camera was low it was tilted to capture the subject's face which resulted in a shift in the plane of focus. You can see this clearly where the tie knot is sharply in focus and the subject's face is slightly out of focus.

3. A 35mm lens is categorized as a wide angle lens. To get more flattering shots you need to use a longer focal length lens....85mm to 135mm is considered the norm for portraiture depending on the amount of working space available. A wide angle lens can be used in a pinch but its likely to introduce distortions.


I'd strongly suggest you Google the word "headshots" and take a look at how they are typically done. Here's one informative website: Headshots 101

Notice that there are no "up the nose" shots.

Its not clear how you're converting to B&W but I'd say the answer to your question is "yes." And even at this small size there's visible luma noise on his suit jacket.

PixelMagic wrote in post #11043750
Can you tolerate an honest critique?

In my opinion these are neither professional nor formal. Rather than waste time trying to edit these photos I would offer a reshoot.

Absolutely, thats the only way to get better, so thank you

Like mentioned earlier, I didn't do the actual shooting. The clients exact words were "They need to be very straight on, no angles or anything" My partner did however, after a few test fires sit on the backing of a chair while shooting, and I think its a combination of him looking up, and naturally being large nostrilled, but heres a few I think might be better

I probably grabbed one of the bad examples, heres 2 I think are a little better.

the 35mm was used for only a short moment, the rest of the shoot was done with a 70-200 2.8 IS

I'd strongly suggest you Google the word "headshots" and take a look at how they are typically done. Here's one informative website: Headshots 101

Notice that there are no "up the nose" shots.

Theres a few different ways i've been playing with. Lightroom 3.2 has a bunch of presets, but these are all pretty much just done using the supersaturation slider in LR. I also think is has to do with photoshop not letting me save a max 1024 side image any less than a quality of 3, to keep it under 150k


I appreciate your critique, honestly. Heres 2 color ones. These are SOOC except cropped 8x10 but not tightened and converted to jpeg

Drakeskakes wrote in post #11042175
Hows this one, a little better?

I like the second one also but I would work the lighting a little, if you took a RAW image (which I hope you did) you can increase the exposure 1-2 stops and see what becomes. Also clone the wall molding coming out from the back of his head on that second shot. Try doing the monochrome conversion in RAW after you crop and make all the adjustments in Canon's DPP software, I get much better results there than I do in any other program.

enrigonz wrote in post #11044435
I like the second one also but I would work the lighting a little, if you took a RAW image (which I hope you did) you can increase the exposure 1-2 stops and see what becomes. Also clone the wall molding coming out from the back of his head on that second shot. Try doing the monochrome conversion in RAW after you crop and make all the adjustments in Canon's DPP software, I get much better results there than I do in any other program.

Yeah I always clone out the lines =)

Thanks, I'll try using DPP! I've been using either lightrooms saturation slider or CS5's black and white converter