I had the opportunity to photograph my friend and her lovely family. Part of the brief was to get some nice photographs of my friends daughter Nicole who was going to University to study a Drama based degree, the details of which escape me at the moment. Recently, I had the opportunity to look at these photographs again and have a “Play” with them in Portrait Professional and Photoshop. Portrait Professional is software for retouching portraits – removing wrinkles, dealing with skin blemishes and so on. You would guess right if you thought that Nicole wouldn’t need any of that, but I have used it to “Brighten” her eyes and a few other small adjustments for artistic effect. PhotoShop was only used for sharpening – all digital photos put through a RAW converter need sharpening – cameras that convert straight to Jpeg do the sharpening “in camera”. I also used PhotoShop for resizing to web size. 

I usually use a filter called “High pass” then levels for sharpening, using “Unsharp mask” only if the first stage doesn’t work sufficiently, which is rare. You have a choice of light including “soft light” – my favourite for this sort of assignment, “Hard light”, “Vivid light” and a few others – the above photograph has had the benefit of “Vivid light” however, I had already made it quite contrasty in Portrait Professional. I wanted “Striking”.