5 Portrait HACKS Everyone Wishes They Knew Sooner! 📸

Comments · 826

• SI

  @simmo303 · 6 years ago

  Tip 6: ask sitter to look at a point behind you. Tip 7: ask sitter to think of someone that they love.

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• SH

  @ShreyaSingh-fo6gc · 5 years ago

  video starts at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNUlFDsfcJQ&amp;t=74">1:14</a>

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• WI

  @wilsonstevens1535 · 6 years ago

  I am an Industrial photographer, and the most important technique I use is an on-camera flash set for about 1 f-stop less than the available light to highlight the subject eyes and put a white highlight in them. It makes a world of difference when the editor chooses photos for publication. The ones with the flash almost always get chosen over ones without the flash.

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• AY

  @ayuchanayuko · 5 years ago (edited)

  My personal tip as a commercial printer,as opposed to your first tip:<br><br>ALWAYS have headroom on all sides. You need them for both cropping to your required aspect ratio and for filling your bleeds. This works for personal 4R prints up to professional publications like magazines with sizes/ratios ranging from 8x10, 8.5x11, to A4s and 9x12s. Bleeds is where you lay out your photo in a full-page with the intentions that your sides will be cut intentionally but is there since printing and cutting is never perfect. You allow the printer up to 3mm usually to have this margin of error for the trim. So if you don&apos;t have this, the printer will either just print a shade of rich black, white, a mirrored version for you edges, or zoom in your photo even more so we can fill your bleed gaps. Think of yourself as a videographer -- Cinema cameras always have these rectangular crop guides with margins that still capture footage outside these guides knowing they will intentionally be crop out or be used by editors for leeway in editing.<br><br>Tip2:<br>Most commercial presses use FOGRA39 as a baseline for CMYK color profiles. To predict and more or less control the final outcome of your print, always put down the brightness of your monitor to match a white piece of paper at the base of your monitor. Then use Photoshop&apos;s softproof mode in FOGRA39 with black ink and paper simulation. Depending on your printer, they may or may not use Black Point Compensation -- in our case as a printer, we don&apos;t turn it on so we can maintain the vibrance of your colors. Turning it on preserves the details in your deep blacks at the expense of washing out your colors (which is print&apos;s way of increasing brightness).<br><br>You can work while in this mode to create a &quot;print&quot; version of your work to recover unprintable colors or flattened details. As a person inside whose job used to be to match our clients&apos; monitors who know squat about optimizing and designing for print, I notice that with people with normal monitors, I at least have to add Brightness+20 to 25; For bright monitors, I at least have to add Brightness+40 to 50. I might then remap certain unprintable colors that become &quot;flat&quot; like reflex blue to closer to cyan-ish (C100M60) and fruit orange to closer to vermillion (M40Y100).<br><br>If you have your printer&apos;s go ahead, you can also convert your work to CMYK using Photoshop&apos;s Convert To Profile command and using FOGRA39 as your target CMYK profile. You may also use whatever profile your printer uses or if they provide you with one. If working with uncoated papers, FOGRA29 is a good reference point. You can play around with Black Point Compensation and a host of rendering techniques to preserve your RGB work. Usually its Relative Colorimetric, but my favorite is Perceptual for photos. It is less accurate color-wise, but it preserves the impact of a photo and usually a good perception of your photo in print.<br><br>Be advised though that printers still have color delta margins and will not be always the same. Mass-produced publications also will have prints that range from dark to washed out as the print machine stabilized per signature/face.<br><br>Tip3:<br>If you are printing black and white, do the same above to convert to FOGRA39 or your target profile but make sure your CMY values are not equal or too close to each other. Having them perfectly equal or close will yield prints or spreads that don&apos;t have the same shade of rich gray. Control this by using Selective Color &gt; Blacks and make sure you have a healthy margin where each CMY ink is more or less 10% ahead of each other at around the 50% grays. I usually go for cool grays as a bluish gray (Cyan+Magenta) tends to look neutral in human perception, so I will go for something like Cyan 60, Magenta 50, Yellow 40 as a reference point for midtone grays. If you want a warmer print with a tendency to go yellowish/red, then you make Magenta 60 Yellow 50, Cyan 40.<br><br>Tip4:<br>A competent printer will always respects your RGB profile so always attach your color profile. Some disregard your CMYK profile but thats fine as most people really don&apos;t know how to use CMYK and you will pass on your file in a press-ready CMYK PDF anyway if you do know what you&apos;re doing. <br><br>Tip5:<br>Finally, even after all you could do, always remember its not about color accuracy -- its about how the viewer sees it. The viewer doesn&apos;t know that the sky was originally this shade of teal but if it looks great and the impact is preserved, leave it at that. Printing is an art in and of itself and we should learn to let go. Our prints look different in every situation ranging from outdoor lights to indoor 6500K lights to professional 5000K lights to LED lights to flickering bulbs. Heck, even 50 and 60Hz lights will make colors and print look differently. Knowing that, you learn to just admire the beauty.

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• MR

  @mrm8818 · 5 years ago

  1/ fill the frame (remove the headroom)<br>2/ Catchlights (get a good reflection from the eyes)<br>3/ Eye placement (shy people look away showing less iris) instruct them to look in same direction of their nose<br>4/ Lighting (golden hour nice soft light / midday harsh light)<br>5/ Draw a great expression - get them to perform a pose etc link in the flash card

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• NI

  @nickbrown3979 · 6 years ago

  That was 5 minutes well spent, a few tips from someone who is willing to share his knowledge, no annoying music or intros, keep up the good work.

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• SA

  @samc1056 · 5 years ago

  A picture is worth a thousand words. Show pictures.

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• HE

  @hersh23 · 5 years ago

  As a guy who is trying to learn Portraits, these were helpful tips! The eyes tip was very helpful

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• BA

  @barkyvonschnauzer2188 · 5 years ago

  Love the way how he rocks backwards &amp; forwards like a giddy little school boy talking to the rest of the class 😘

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• HO

  @hollykbae5231 · 5 years ago

  Tell the subject to do a powerful pose with their feet, even if you can’t see their feet in the photo when you are just starting the session with them. You may have to demonstrate. I find telling girls to give a sassy pose (whatever their interpretation of that is) empowers them to feel confident in the photos. Even if you don’t use these photos in final product — it’s about getting them confident and getting expressions

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• TI

  @TimXMan · 5 years ago (edited)

  Excelente video <br>1. Fill the frame <br>2. Catch light <br>3. Eye placement <br>4. Expression <br>5. Time of day

  3

• JE

  @jeffcressman462 · 1 year ago

  that model is stunningly gorgeous