Beauty Photography: Shoot at Home on a Budget

1. Introduction: Hello my friends. I'm Devon Lennox. I'm a fashion and beauty photographer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I've been a professional photographer since 2018 going full-time, the fall of 2020. On screen right now I'll show you a sample and collection of my most recent images that said, I want to take a deep dive into departure for more fashion editorial photography, to beauty photography. With this Skillshare course, I'm going to show you the full behind the scenes of how to capture these images at home on budget very comfortably. With this Skillshare course, we're going to go behind the scenes. I'm going to show you the full workflow that you will need. That includes the tools, the techniques, your space, and also the equipment that you'll need. Then we're going to capture our images. From there we're going to take that image into post-production for retouching, finalizing it, and perfecting it to a commercial level. I've aim this course at intermediate photographers who already have a basic understanding of their camera operation and focal length. That said if you are a beginner, I will be explaining everything in great depth with easy to understand terms so you won't get lost and you'll still be able to gain valuable knowledge and insight throughout the duration of this course. The ultimate aim of this Skillshare course is to give you the tools and techniques necessary for you to accomplish these results for yourselves at home and replicate your own and beauty photography images from popular editorials like Vogue, L and N style, to name a few. I've also included a class project to go along with this course, which will be for you to upload between one and three of your very own beauty photography at home images. From there, I want you to include a short description explaining your thinking and what you've learned from the shoot and then upload those images and the description to the classic gallery. From there, we can give you constructive feedback and we can all grow together. With that said, I'm excited to be your instructor for the duration of this course and will see you on the inside. 2. Studio Space: Hello my friends, Davon Lenix here, and welcome. Excited to have you here. Let's get started. In this lesson, I would love to discuss arguably the most important aspect of replicating these images at home, which is going to be your shooting environment and the considerations you want to make about your impromptu studio space. Shooting a beauty editorial at home doesn't require much space since these images are often taken at chest level or higher. But despite having such a tight crop on subjects, this type of photography does still require some space and working distance between you and the model. It's important to make sure your shooting space or studio is large enough to accommodate. Thankfully, for most of us, even those in one-bedroom or even studio apartments, we still have ample room to replicate these images at home, particularly if you have a combined living in a dining room setup, but even most dedicated living rooms and separate dining rooms by themselves will work. In fact, over the last four years, I've shot several dozen beauty photography editorials in my living room in this very fashion. I can't confirm that the lighting setup will cover later in this course works and is rock solid. But it's primarily because all of the apartments, even actual studio apartments I've lived in, offered very similar dimensions, and the dimensions that I'm about to list here are what I feel are the minimums to accomplish this type of photography at home. I encourage you to take some time right now to measure your space with a tape measure to confirm that it'll be sufficient. Otherwise, look for somewhere else in your home to find the necessary space to set everything up. Those dimensions are as follows, a width of 6 feet, a length or depth of 10 feet, and a ceiling height of about 8 feet. Now, if your space meets these minimum dimensions, you're clear to capture beauty photography images at home, and you'll be able to do so comfortably without any issues. However, if you're shooting a smaller room than describe, you'll find it tricky to capture these images comfortably. It won't be impossible by any means, but maneuvering your camera equipment and lighting setup will be tricky, and you might find that this becomes insufficient long-term. At the same time though, if you have a larger space than described, you will have more flexibility to choose a longer focal lens or vary your lens selection, and in that case, you have quite an advantage. That said, there's other things to consider outside of the space or your dimensions alone though. You're also going to need to consider the color of your home's walls as it will affect your final image. Ideally, you want the walls painted with a flat, neutral gray, so it's entirely free of color casts and doesn't affect your camera's white balance. But for most of us, especially those of us that live in apartments, having such a color is not possible. Instead, most homes and apartments will have white walls. Thankfully, this also works great. The only downside is that white walls will act as a reflector in this case, filling in on both sides of your subject if you're in a truly small space. In this instance, you will find it difficult to control the lighting to create a more moody beauty photography image, since the light will spill onto both sides of the subject and fill in the shadows, reducing contrast. For that, you'll want to add a flag or a grid to your main light. But this makes things more complicated than the scope of this particular Skillshare course. That said though, for most instances of beauty photography, having white walls on both sides could be an advantage and create a more bright and airy photo, which looks refreshing and clean and it usually adds to these images. However, I want to point out one important thing here, and that is your home doesn't have white walls at all, instead, they're colored, that's where we'll run into a problem. If you have colored walls or a wall wrapped with vinyl or wallpaper, the color of the wall will change your photo's color. In this case, it will directly affect your camera's white balance, the model's, complexion, the color of your background, and the appearance of the clothing your model's wearing in a negative way. You'll want to remove that vinyl rapping or wallpaper or paint the wall in a more neutral color long-term if that's possible. However, if that's not possible or that's simply too impractical, you can box in your model using a double-sided poster board. In this case, it can effectively serve as its own wall and flag off any colored walls that you have in your home, thus removing all of those color cast issues. But perfect, now you're aware of the main considerations about your shooting space. Let's now discuss the camera and lighting equipment we'll need to get started. 3. Lighting & Camera Equipment: So hello my friends, Devaun Lennox here and welcome back. In this video, we'll talk about the lighting and camera equipment you'll need to accomplish these kinds of images at home. But first, let's kick things off by talking about the lighting equipment. At a minimum, you'll want a stroke, also known as a Monolight, with a flash output power of 150 watts or higher. With 150 watts, you'll be able to shoot at higher apertures like F8 or 11, letting you capture excellent detail on your model in sharp focus. Some of these details could include the nuances and their lipstick or gloss, fine gradations in color in their makeup or eye shadow, or even the dewiness of their skin. The particular unit I use for the headline image for this course was the pause Buff Einstein stroke, an 8641 daylight-balanced strobe. You'll also want a trigger for this light or the lamp you plan on using for your shoot. To trigger these kinds of lights, you can either use a wired system, which uses a wired flash cable that connects directly to the PC Sync terminal on your camera. Or you can use a wireless system that transmits by connecting directly to the hot shoe of your camera. Either will work perfectly fine, but for my shoot, I use the cyber sink wireless studio flash triggers, which is the wireless transmission system that policy buffer recommends for this product. Next, you'll want a sturdy light stand, but more importantly, you'll want one that offers a boom arm. With a boom arm, you can offset the light from the legs of the light stand, which lets you should directly below the light without any hassles. Of course, you can use a traditional light stand and offset it by changing the angle slightly and you can still shoot straight onto your model. But having a boom arm for this type of photography will prove invaluable long term since it will offer you the most shooting space in your entire environment and the flexibility when moving around your model. Either way, I recommend opting for a more heavy-duty aluminum light stand here, such as those manufactured by photo deoxy or impact. These light stands offer more rugged knobs that won't break after only six months of use and they also support a higher payload rating, which would be helpful since you may also use them with a boom arm to offset your light. Plus, these products are only marginally more expensive than their cheaper alternatives, so they're definitely worth the investment. From there, you'll also want a soft box to modify and soften the light from your strobe. In this aspect, you have many options which are only going to be limited based on your shooting space. You can use compacts soft boxes, or umbrellas as large as eight feet here. But to keep things simple and cost-effective, the best option is opting for a 48-inch Okta Box or a beauty dish for the headlining image, I used the policy Buff white beauty dish. But you can easily replicate this identical lighting setup with a much cheaper, newer 48-inch Okta Box, which is also collapsible, offers both interior and exterior diffusion to soften the light and diffuse it more. For the price, the build quality, and the general functionality of that product for this medium is absolutely invaluable. In total, you can replicate the identical setup that I use, albeit to a slightly less build quality for just $200 USD. But I can guarantee you that the results between both of these setups are identical. So absolutely no need for the price of the equipment, especially if you're a beginner. Now with lighting covered, let's talk about your camera equipment. I can't stress enough, use the camera and lens setup that you already have, but if you're really looking to hone your skills and do this medium exclusively, getting an 85-millimeter F1.8 lens will eventually become a must while the 50-millimeter F1.8 lens is usually the go to upgrade for most photographers wanting to hone their skills. For this medium, the 85-millimeter focal length is the industry standard. Not only will you notice better image quality, particularly in central sharpness and low light performance with an 85 millimeter F1.8 lens, you'll also get more flattering images since the characteristics of this lens tend to narrow the models' facial features, and that almost always makes the models look more attractive. For most manufacturers, the 85-millimeter F1 point lens or its equivalent is usually quite cost-effective as well and less than $300 USD. But understandably, if you want to skip this particular expense and you already have a kit lens, you can use that instead, especially if you have a 28-70 millimeter or equivalent kit lens. The focal lens of kit lens does vary quite a bit. But there are some models that are longer than 50 millimeters and close enough to 85 or 90 millimeters, so if your lens already fits the bill, no need to buy another lens. It'll work perfectly fine, as is for this kind of photography. Next, you may also want to consider a backdrop or background support system and you may also want to consider a colored seamless paper to add some more interest and theme to your images. However, if you shoot on a white wall and it's sufficiently far enough away, say, five or six feet, you can skip this particular expense as well if you want just a white background. Alternatively, you can mount a well-ironed bed sheet or similar fabric, clamped or draped over a window sill. That would also work, granted, both of these methods will require some post-processing to remove any distractions or unevenness in the background. But it's still a good starting point. That said, if you do want more flexibility and control over the colors and the type of background, a dedicated backdrop support system will only increase your total by $100 USD. It's fair to say that a white seamless paper or fashion grade seamless paper delivers a truly professional result that'll make your images on par with anyone else in the industry, so it's an expense that's definitely worth it. Ultimately though, the lighting kit is the most important aspect of the equipment you need for this type of photography. And considering this type of photography only requires minimal gear, i.e a single light, we're looking at a very affordable entry point into beauty photography that even the newest photographers can accomplish. But great, now that we've covered the necessary lighting and camera equipment, let's talk about the position of your lighting. 4. Lighting Setup: Hello my friends, Devaun Lennox here and welcome back. In this lesson, we'll talk about the lighting setup and how you'll position your light. First, let me show you a rendering on-screen of the lighting setup right now so you can get an idea of how things will look like. But let's cover the setup in more detail, starting with the distances in general positioning of your light in your space. Ideally, you want your model to be between 3-5 feet away from your background. Doing so will mean that less light hits the background, letting the background fall off to a medium gray, rather than stay as an uneven white. I'll show you the difference between a positioning of the model 5 feet away from the background and directly in front of the background on screen right now. As you can see, there's a noticeable difference between how bright the background is in these two renderings. It's not a dramatic difference though, but it's definitely something to take note of. But generally having the background directly behind the model accentuates its textures, since we're usually shooting at higher aperture values of f8 or higher and this usually becomes a distraction in this type of photo. I would suggest experimenting with this aspect though for yourself to see if it's a deal breaker though, as it may or may not be depending on your style of photography. With the general distance and positioning of the space covered, let's now talk about the more specific details on where you'll put your light in relation to your model. For beauty photography, we want lighting that is even, flattering and proportionate as we can get. That inevitably means that we will want to position the light directly in front of our model, so all aspects of their face, neck and shoulders are lit the same. We'll also want to get our light as close to our model's face and shoulders as feasible so we can create the softest and most flattering light possible. I find that putting the light 2-3 feet away is the perfect distance for this medium, as it's close enough to create a soft even light on our model, but not so close to the model that the light itself encroaches their personal space and becomes somewhat uncomfortable to our model. Now, as far as the height of our light, you'll want to position the light so that the bottom of your softbox or the beauty dish, if you're using one, is just above eye of your model. In most cases, that will be somewhere around 5-6 feet, depending if they're standing or sitting. Putting it at this height will mean two things. One, it will be just high enough for you to shoot directly underneath it and straight onto your model and that means you'll capture the model's face without adding any distortion that comes from tilting your camera, which can add foreshortening and usually doesn't help to make people look attractive and second, it also means that the light will be focused on your subject's face and shoulders, which is exactly where we want it to be, rather than being too high and then focused on their hair, or too low and hitting their chest, neither of which is where we want our viewers to be seeing first. From here, you can experiment with the angle or tilt of your softbox and light. By tilting the light downwards, say 45 degrees, you're creating slightly more shadows and contouring on your model's face, particularly underneath their nose and around their cheekbones and underneath the neck. In this positioning with the light, you'll create what's known as butterfly lighting, which works well for beauty photography if you want something slightly more angular and bold. But if you want something more soft, even and flattering, then leaving your light at a 90 degree or pointed directly straight forward angle will flatten the image and create the most pleasing light on your subject. On screen, I'll show you a rendering of the difference between these two types of angle positions right now. As you can see, there is a difference between both of them, but the results are subtle and it's not dramatic. However, you're going to notice this becoming a major difference once you finalize and retouch the image later in post-processing. Still, ultimately, each of these options does come down to personal preference and the style of beauty photography you're going after. That said, it's an element worth experimenting with and to see which is going to suit your particular photography style the best. The last and final variable will be whether to add a reflector underneath your model's neck and chin. This is an optional step, but something to experiment with as well. If you're looking to flatten your image and reduce the contrast and make it more pleasing overall, this addition will create an even more flattering light as it will reduce contrast, which is particularly helpful if you're doing a photography style that's more soft and doesn't have as much contrast and hardness. On-screen I'll show you the difference between adding a reflector versus leaving it out. For the headlining image for this course, I did use a reflector underneath the model to bounce more lighting back onto the subject. Doing so does reduce contrast and fill in the shadows. But in retrospect, it may have been a better option to go without the reflector for this particular shot, since the image already had a dark mood and is graphic as is, so this kind of lighting would have brought the theme together more. But as it stands, it does work as it is. However, congratulations, from here you have the complete lighting setup, so position yourself a few feet away and start experimenting with your composition. Now that we've covered the complete lighting setup, let's discuss the camera settings and how you set up your camera. 5. Camera Setup: Hello, my friends, Devaun Lennox here, and welcome back. In this lesson, we'll talk about your camera settings and getting the best results. First, let's start with camera settings. Since we're shooting indoors under controlled lighting conditions, our exposure will be dictated by our aperture and ISO settings. Shutter speed only comes into play as a basic setting to sync with our a term called flash sync, and to make sure we avoid getting blurred by shooting handheld. But otherwise, it doesn't play the same role as other forms of photography, so don't worry too much about that particular setting. Now, since we have complete control over how much light is in our environment by adjusting our flash output power to change how much light is hitting our subject, it's best to set our camera to their base, ISO. At the base ISO, our cameras will capture the most dynamic range, least amount of noise, and the best image quality possible. For most cameras on the market, the base ISO is either 100, 160, or 200, so when you're ready to start shooting, first set your camera to its base ISO. Next, our aperture setting. This will determine our depth of field and how much of our subject is in sharp focus. For this type of photography, you have many options, and this setting will likely come down to the style of image you prefer. But it's generally best to start with an aperture setting of F/8 or F/11, as these values will provide enough depth of the field to capture all of the details on your model's face. But you're welcome to test a lower aperture setting like F/4, or F/2.8, and these aperture settings will result in a more shallow depth of field. That could be a great option if you want to blur any blemishes on your model's skin, making the post-processing easier. Or you can only focus on some aspects of the model, like their eyes, and have everything else fall out and focus, which creates a more impactful photo in a lot of cases. Either way, when you're ready to start shooting, switch your aperture setting to F/8, and use that as a starting point from there. Lastly, our shutter speed, which in this type of photography is the least important aspect of exposure, but when it comes to shutter speed, there are still some notes that we want to keep in mind. Generally, a shutter speed of 1/125. Second, is a great starting point for this type of photography as it offers enough speed to prevent any blur when shooting handheld, but it's also a safe value that syncs with most commercial flash units and the transmitters that are available. At this value, you won't have any issues sinking with your flash unit and hitting its maximum flash sync speed. Like Aperture, you're also welcome to explore slower shutter speeds than 1/1/250 per second, and these slower values could be an excellent means to add more creative effects to your photos by purposely introducing motion blur to create a ghosting effect. Perfect. Now that we've covered the basic camera settings, let's cover some pointers on getting the best results. If your cameras supports face and eye detection, enable this feature and set the focusing area to the top third of the LCD. Now, the reason for setting the auto-focus to the top third of the LCD is that we often shoot in portrait orientation rather than landscape for this form of photography, and setting your auto-focus point to the top third rather than the center will reduce how often you have to focus and recompose an image, saving you time while shooting. But more importantly, it also speeds up your camera's focusing in general, reducing its focus acquisition time, and that'll decrease how often it hunts for focus, so in the end, it will ultimately mean you create more consistently in-focus images. Next, if your camera has accurate and reliable continuous audit focusing called the CAF or continuous autofocus, you're welcome to use this feature. However, if you find you're focusing system is often hit or miss using AFS or single-shot autofocus with face and eyes detection will definitely give you the best results. Next, let's talk about white balance. Our white balance on later generation cameras say those manufactured after 2018 will provide an auto white balance that's close enough to accurate for this type of situation and you shouldn't find the colors are so distracting and off that they're going to require enormous color adjustments to post-processing, but if you have an older camera that was manufactured before 2018, using the flash white balance setting will give you a more consistent color to your image and be more accurate than using auto-white balance. Alternatively, you can dial in a custom white balance setting using the Kelvin mode on your camera, and you'll likely dominant value somewhere between 5000 and 5600 Kelvin, depending on what your color flash output is, but you have to know your manufacturer's color temperature. Still doing this manually will give you even more accurate colors and more accurate white balance than using the flash setting, so it's a better option. From here you want to take a test shot of your subject, now evaluate the image on the rear LCD to check the exposure. Then double-check the exposure using the histogram to make sure you're not overexposing or clipping in the highlights, specifically. In this format of photography, it's better to underexpose your image by a third of a stop, then bring up the exposure in post-processing. Since we will be shooting a model's faces primarily and if their skin is wet, Dewey, or oily, it will reflect even more light than normal. If you overexposed those particular highlights, you won't be able to recover those details and post-processing, and in general, that can ruin images. Great though, now that we've covered your camera setup and some of the tips to capture the best images possible, let's wrap up with some final considerations you'll want to make on the shoot itself. 6. Other Considerations: Hello, my friends. Devaun Lennox here and welcome back. In this lesson, we'll cover the final two considerations you want to make on the shoot. Those are going to be whether you should use a reflector to reduce contrasts and to fill in the shadows or should you consider tethering while shooting to review your images. For the course image, I did use a reflector underneath the model's chin to fill in the shadows. In this case, I use a four-foot silver reflector positioned just below chest level. On screen right now, I'll show you the effect of adding a reflector underneath the model's chin for this type of photography versus removing them. It's important, I note that you don't have to use a reflector, especially if you're going for an image that has more contrast or you want something more bold in those situations, adding a reflector will only serve to go against your idea. Skipping it is best. That said, if you want an image with only minor contrast and contouring, using a reflector is a perfect way to achieve that particular effect. Next, you may want to consider connecting your camera to your computer so you can transfer the photos and review them in real-time as you're shooting. This process is known as tethering and it's a great workflow to be able to assess fine details that are difficult to see on the camera's LCD, such as the model's make-up, hairstyle, or even the effects of your lighting. It's also an excellent way to be able to see the adjustments you're making in real-time, such as changing the angle of your light or it's simply a great option to show the model you're working with, the amazing images you're capturing. If you want to find detailed information about how to set this up before your camera and software setup you can do a quick online search and find plenty of information but setting that up specifically is outside of the scope of this course. Great now that we've covered the two final considerations, you now know how to capture beauty photography images at home. Let's head over to the post-production workflow to refine and finish up our images so we can take what we've captured so far to a professional level. 7. Fixing Exposure: So hello my friends, Devon Lennox here and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start the post-production workflow to take the images that you've captured to a truly professional level. I want to make an important note here as far as software, I'm not using Adobe Photoshop or Light room for the post-production workflow. I have a course already on Skill share detailing how to do exactly the same workflow that I'm about to cover here in Affinity Photo on iOS or iPad. You can check out that Skill share course if you want,and specific details on how to do this in Adobe Photoshop. But with that said, let's get over into post-production workflow. So here we are on iOS, this is the DNG photo I will be supplying as a part of the resources for this particular Skill share course, so you're welcome to download this image to follow along in a more step-by-step fashion, unless you just want to watch, just to see the techniques in the workflow. Now, let's open up Affinity Photo and open up our image. So now we're here in Affinity Photo by default, Affinity Photo will open up its developed persona and in the developed persona is where we're going to be able to make some of the basic adjustments, which is the first step of our workflow. Here will open up the basics panel and we're prompted with several important aspects of what we're going to be looking for namely, in the top right-hand corner here is going to be the histogram, followed by our exposure spiders, followed by some enhancements, namely contrast, saturation vibrance or white balance selection, and then our shadows and highlights for this particular image and for all images regardless of its Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or even here in Affinity Photo. The first thing is to evaluate the histogram, so we can see if we can maximize our camera's dynamic range by pushing the outermost layers of our histogram, both the highlights and shadows to their maximum values before they start clipping and losing detail. The easiest way to do this is first by adjusting the exposure slider, which is going to adjust the exposure of the entire image as a whole, I find that a value somewhere around 0.15 is sufficient to just bring up the general exposure of the image and start to push the highlights on the right-hand side of this red channel. It's starting to clip here, but it's not actually a clipping. From there, you have a couple of options you can adjust your black point, which is going to basically reduce the shadows and the mid-tones. But more importantly, an easier way to do this is actually by just decreasing the shadow slider, which is just going to specifically focus on the shadows rather than shadows and the blacks and some of the mid-tones. Here what I'm doing is adjusting the shadows slider to push the histogram up here as far to the left as possible before losing detail and I find that a value of negative 100 is completely sufficient. If you also want to add more contrast, you can also increase the black point to a value of 5% and that will also increase the shadows and the darks. But that's going a little bit too far so the value of 3% is getting me the dynamic range where I'm pushing the blacks and the shadows all the way to the left and I'm pushing the highlights all the way up. You're also welcome to increase the highlights slider if you want even more punch in contrast, I would probably say a maximum of 10% for this image would be as far as I'd go because after that point we're starting to click too many of the whites. And now we can use the before and after to see the added contrast. We've crunched up the blacks a little bit. We added more contrast to the overall image. The exposure on her face is about the same as what it was before, but we've just fundamentally increased the contrast. The only other adjustments I would make is just potentially coming down into the lens correction slider here and turning on distortion and then turning on distortion for your lens. As you can see that fixed some barrel distortion since I was using a 35-millimeter F2, a 50-millimeter equivalent lens, and F50 millimeters shooting this close, I'm going to have some distortion. So if you're in that situation, you're shooting this close to your subject and you're using a 50 millimeter or shorter lens, then you will have some barrel distortion and possibly even yay, which you can fix by going into detail setting and Adobe Lightroom or the details setting and Adobe Photoshop, or here in the lens correction panel for Affinity Photo. You're also welcome to remove any vignette if it's applicable. For this image, it's not applicable so I'm not going to enable that. But with that said, we can hit the check mark to develop our image and we can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the next set of steps, so I'll see you there. 8. Cropping & Background Cleanup: Hello my friends Devaun Lennox here and welcome back. In this lesson we're going to crop the photo and clean up any blemishes on our background and remove any major distractions before we go into the more detailed oriented retouching process. For this, the first step that I would naturally go about doing is in Affinity Photo by using the crop tool, do a couple of options when it comes to the mode, you can do original ratio or custom ratio. For the most part, original ratio will be great. However, you can use a custom ratio and set this to 8 by 10 high. If you're uploading specifically to Instagram or other social media, as this is one of the maximum portrait length requirements. Alternatively, you can tap in 10 by 10, which is going to be the covalent one-by-one square. If you would also like to do a one-by-one square for this particular image I'm going to do an 8 by 10 rather than leave the original aspect ratio and then we can just go in and we can do our crop. I'll go in here and I'll resize this to the appropriate level and I will go in and put that third and move that over and we can call that crop finished. Now, for most of your images, once you cropped to the necessary aspect ratio, you could call it good here and just move on to the next steps of the workflow. However, for this image is specifically I would like to show you an additional technique and that's going to be how to quickly remove distracting elements like large reflectors from your images so you can maintain your original aspect ratio without having a crop. Specifically, what I'm talking about is down here I have a silver reflector. I'm going to show you in a very short technique and workflow here how you can remove that without having to painstakingly go through and do frequency separation in painting or clone stamping, patch tool, these things there's an easier way to do this. An Affinity Photo and you can do also do this in Photoshop as well. You're going to basically do a selection of the surrounding area using the rectangular marquee tool. You're going to select both the subject and the background, careful not to actually select the object you're trying to remove then what you're going to do it here in Affinity Photo is go back to our normal photo mode. You're going to use the move tool, select your object here that we just did, and we're going to drag it down. Now this is going to cause a little bit of distortion, particularly maybe slightly noticeable on your models hand here, if you have that. But this is an easy fix that we can come back to later if necessary if you find it distracting. But besides that, and that is the easiest way to fix it, you're going to come back here to selections persona, come up here and de-select. They're in a matter of basically 10 seconds you can go and you can remove that entire area and it fell swoop. The only other thing to note is that if you zoom in closely, you can start to see this faint gray line here of where we made our selection using the rectangular marquee tool. This is a very easy fix and something you may not even need to fix depending on the type of image that you're going after. Especially what the viewing distance is, because if you're looking at the photo here, no one's ever going to notice it, so you don't have to fix it. But if someone's going to be zooming into the photo in great detail, you will start to notice it at some point. Very easy fix that we can come back to later if you find it distracting but for the time being, I just want to point that out, but you probably won't have to worry about it. The last step of this workflow is going to be cleaning up any distractions in the remaining areas of the background namely, that's going to be unevenness in terms of texture and your background or in this case, I have some sensor dust right here that I would like to remove. I'm going to go back over to the photos persona. This is a very easy fix so I'm going to just come here to the clone stamp and come out and use the inpainting brush. Pick a reasonable width here and I'm just going to just come in and just paint that. The inpainting tool basically functions the same way as the spot healing or healing brush a clone stamp as hybrid. You can just painting and it samples, the surrounding color texture, and tone to basically get rid of blemishes. But with that said, those are the only distractions I'm seeing here and we can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the next set of steps so I'll see you there. 9. Skin Cleanup: Hello, my friends Devaun Linux here and welcome back. In this particular lesson we're going to go through and do our skin clean up, which is specifically going to be removing any blemishes and uneven texture in our model skin. There are many ways to do this particular technique. However, for this particular Skillshare course, I'm going to keep things very simple and show you the easiest and fastest, and most effective tool, which in this case is going to be using the inpainting tool here in Affinity Photo, which is a rough equivalent to the spot healing brush in Adobe Photoshop, and it's a mixture between a healing brush and a clone stamp. Essentially what this tool is going to do, it's going to sample both the texture and tone of the area that we paint in. It's going to analyze that selection and try to replicate in blend in that painted area with the surrounding pixels to make that area look a little more, I suppose the best word I would say, make it look a little bit more cohesive and even to actually find the impainting brush, we're going to go over here into our tools panel. Under the clone brush, we have the end painting brush right here. The easiest way to actually apply this effect is just going to be just painting over the blemishes that you want to remove. However, I would suggest that you make a duplicate of your background layer so that you can adjust the opacity of this effect, so you're not applying it directly to your background layer. To do that, we can just hit our three icons here and hit Duplicate. Now that we have a duplicate, our background layer, we're safe to apply this effect and we can just paint over the blemishes. Now for this particular shoot, our model does have great skin and she also did an amazing job on her makeup by adding a lot of concealer and blush and just really just blending in her overall makeup very well. There's not really going to be that much for us to do here, but I'm just going to show you the basic effect. Essentially what you want to do with this brush, you're going to set the source to current layer rather than current layer and below. Because you want the effect to just be applied to the current layer and its sampling just to be on the current layer. As far as settings, you're going to adjust the brush width to just be slightly larger than the blemish you're trying to remove for example for this blemish right here, which is going to just be like an age line, or just make it 20 to 40 pixels. Opacity and flow, you can leave those both at 100 percent, and hardness is going to be 0 percent. Because we want a very soft edge and soft transition. Then you're just going to zoom in and try to stay at less than a one-to-one zoom so that you can just really apply the effect on a very specific small level and that you're not zooming out all the way to here and then applying it with larger brushstrokes, because unfortunately, doing this technique, it does tend to remove the texture, and you can actually get this texture back by using techniques such as frequency separation. You can also add noise later in the post-production workflow to actually get this texture back before this particular Skillshare course, I'm not going to get into some of these more advanced beauty retouching. I'm going to leave that for a more advanced course. But just know that by using this particular technique, just like using the Spot Healing Brush in Adobe Photoshop, you will absolutely be losing a little bit of texture. There are things that we can do to get that texture back, so it's not a deal breaker, but I'm just pointing that out so that you're going to be losing a little bit of texture, and it's going to be smoothing out some of these areas. Unless you're zooming in at the same zoom level that I'm using right now, you're not going to notice the smudginess or the lack of texture that we're doing by actually applying this particular technique. But that said, there, if you are going to, someone's going to be viewing your image this close, you are going to notice that's just like smudginess. But with that said, all we're going to do is basically just paint over anything that we find to be a little bit distraction. As far as textures is concerned. There are other tools that you can use to do this, but I find that the inpainting brush here in Affinity Photo is by far the best tool you could use the patch tool, you can use the clone brush. I can use the healing brush. All these other tools definitely do work. But in painting is by far the most superior brushing technique and workflow without a question about is absolutely the best unless you're going to use specifically frequency separation and then go through that. But basically, I'm going to just stay at the zoom level so I can just go around the canvas and just fix any of these areas I think that are potentially not permanent texture on our model's skin. Or it could be something that you want to just remove from aesthetic purposes, and then just get rid of some of these lines here, clear up some of that. But it's as simple as just painting over. And since we're zoomed in so much and we're just keeping our brush very small and localized, the changes aren't going to be super, super notice when you zoom out. But if you zoom out and then you use a larger brush like I was mentioning before, one the inpainting is going to take a while, but then also it usually messes with the texture, and then you can start to notice that there's repeating patterns in the texture, or the texture just looks a little bit soft, and it doesn't look right and you actually will be able to notice that difference. By just keeping your Zoom really tight and then keeping your brush in the 20-40-pixel range, you can easily go around the entire face. It shouldn't be noticeable that you're losing texture. But like I said, if you know that, that's a problem, there are ways to get that texture packets, really not the end of the world. Now, I've completed the vast majority of the face here. You're also welcome to do the same technique on other aspects of your photo, on your model's skin that would include their hands. You can also do it on the garment and the clothing. But that's pretty much the premise for this section of the workflow, and this is the general idea of what you're going to do in this particular step of the workflow. Just using the inpainting tool, you can get very far. You're going to remove a lot of blemishes and you can really clear up the texture. As matter of fact, let me just show you the before and after. It's not going to be a gigantic difference because this photo, like I was mentioning before, she has great skin already and she did an amazing job with her makeup, so there wasn't really much to retouching impaint here. But if you are shooting a model and you're doing beauty photography, and the model didn't really do a great job with the makeup or you didn't have a makeup artist in your shoot, that's when you're going to really be able to notice a bigger difference in terms of removing blemishes and acne and that thing. But that's the fundamental step for this part of the workflow, and we can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the next set of steps, so I'll see you there. 10. Dodge & Burn: Hello my friends, Davon Linux here and welcome back. In this lesson, I want to cover and show you a technique in the industry known as Dodge and Burn. If you're unfamiliar with the Dodge and Burn technique, essentially it's a technique that you use to add contrast locally in your image so that effectively means that you're adding more brightness to the bright areas and you're darkening the dark areas of the photo, but you're able to paint in the effect rather than use a contrast slider or an exposure or a black point and highlight slider that you can find in Photoshop Lightroom or here in Affinity Photo in the exposure adjustment basic tabs, those effect the image globally. With Dodge and Burn you're actually applying a similar effect but you're doing it in a very localized and very specific area, which allows you to add more contouring in contrast to more specific areas that you want to exaggerate your photo. Effectively it also allows you to maybe add highlights that don't exist, add shadows that don't exist. You can also contour different musculature and facial jaw features. Nose, the bridge of the nose. You can make people's their jaw lines more angular or make them a little bit more round. You could also relate subjects and add a two or three point lighting setup with dodging and burning. Overall, it's very effective and it's also a great way for you to fix any lighting mistakes that you've made onset, which in this case, I pointed my light slightly off to the right here. The model's hands is as bright as her face, and I find that distracting. That's the basic premise of what Dodge and Burn is if you're unfamiliar with it. With that said, there's a lot of different techniques on how you can actually apply Dodge and Burn locally. But the specific way that I'm going to show you right now is the easiest way that you can do this in photoshop, Lightroom, Capture one in here and at Affinity Photo. There are more advanced ways to do this. There are also other dedicated brushes to do this as well but I find that this technique is the easiest and it works across all of these applications. Effectively what we're going to do is we're going to use a curves adjustment layer. We're going to set one to brighten the exposure of the image. We're going to set another one to darken the exposure of the image and then we're going to set both of those layers to the luminosity mode. I'll explain why we do that later on. Then we're going to paint on a mask and we're going to apply the effect in certain areas. To get that setup in Affinity Photo here we're going to go over to our adjustments slider. We're going to go down until we hit curves we then come down here to the spline. We're going to tap in the middle and we're going to put that off right here towards the middle. Those are the settings 0.38, 0.62 if you want to copy those, then I'm going to come back over to layers. I'm going to add a new layer, pixel layer. Come over here to the curves again and we're going to go back down to spline and we're going to go down towards the middle, 0.64, 0.34, the opposite of what we had before. I'm going to come back over here to Layers panel. I'm just going to delete that empty layer. Now what we're going to do with both of these layers that we have here, we're going to go over into our blend curves adjustment options and change our blend mode from normal to luminosity. The reason that we're going to change our blend mode from normal to Luminosity is to make sure that this effect only affects tone and it doesn't also simultaneously affect the saturation or color of your image. Sometimes when you add a curves adjustment layer, it can also increase the saturation or decrease the saturation so we don't want that effect to be applied right now because we're going to come back in a later section of this workflow to actually do color correction. If we don't set this blend mode to luminosity here, basically we're going to add more work to a later stage in your workflow and it's going to slow you down, in an effort not to have to add more work later on, just set the blend mode to luminosity so we can avoid any changes. Now you may notice that the image looks crazy. What we're going to do, we're going to add an empty mask to this layer and we're going to add an empty mask to the bottom layer as well. You're also welcome to group both of these layers if you want to adjust the effects of them simultaneously and I'm about to go ahead and do that. I can show you guys the before and after and we can also make the overall effect a lot more subtle. First things first, we're gonna go to our bottom layer, which is going to be our dodge. Dodging is going to be referred to basically the idea of dodging is that you're adding more exposure to the highlights to accentuate the highlights in an image. In this case, where I want to add more highlights or specifically going to be accentuating the models eyes, we're moving some of the bags and shadows that are underneath her eyes. Adding a little bit more of a highlights to her nose, her forehead, adding a little bit of contour to her jaw and cheeks, and then adding a little bit of shimmering to her lips here. Let's go ahead and select the mask and then we're going to go over to our brush tool or regular paintbrush. Our settings are going to be as follows. 100 percent opacity, 100 percent flow, 2 percent hardness and we're going to just basically set the brush size to something large and then we can just paint in the effect. First and foremost, let's just add a little bit highlight. This can be very heavy handed right now, but I'm going to adjust the opacity. Later on, I'm going to open up this shadow underneath her eyes, above her eyes to remove those bags. I'm going to add a little bit more here. I'm going to come in, drop this down, add a little bit of highlight there to the eyes. Eyes. Open those up, add a little bit of highlight underneath the eyebrows and then add a little bit of a touch of a highlight just to the forehead here, bring the forehead out, come back down, make the brush smaller, add a little bit here, a little bit to the lips themselves. I'm going to add a little bit underneath here, accentuate that and then just the cheeks right here. I'm going to add some to the cheeks, get a little bit of that. Then I'm going to come up to the hair add a little bit to the hair. Make this a lot smaller. then we're going to come in and we're going to add some strokes to the hair. Give that some more detail. then let's drop the opacity of this to make this look a little bit more realistic. Let's go down to zoom out. You can already see how much of a difference that's making its opening up the model's eyes. It's giving you that are a little bit more angularity to her face. Where let's say 20%. And now we're gonna go to the burn, which is gonna be the opposite top layer. Make sure we have the mask selected and using our paintbrush on white, we're going to add more contouring and shadows. Let me make my brush a little bit bigger. Add some there. Add some right here. I'm going to add some to the eyebrows, darken the eyebrows a little bit. Come in here and add some to our eyelids here underneath as well. Maybe make the pupil here a little bit darker and then maybe this line just above this fold on the eye. Do that. Come in add some to the hair, darken up the hair, and then darken up this area as well. Now let's do the nose, a little bit contouring to the nose here. Underneath a little bit to the lip here. Underneath the lip as well and then hit the cheeks again. Of course that's still looks incredibly heavy handed. Just need to be able to see the effect. Then we're going to just drop down the opacity. Probably going to end up doing 20 percent as well here. Okay? Now we can turn off the effect on and off. Now another note here, I'm actually going to use the burner to actually reduce the exposure on the model's hands. Paintbrush. Select that just to reduce this area as well. Just because I was finding this highlight a little bit bright and distracting, so we'll do that. Okay, and that brought that highlight down a little bit as well so it's not focusing most lighting on that we have here on model space. You're also welcome to do the same technique on the clothing as well if you find some areas of the clothing to be bright and distracting and if you wanted to bring out like another area, or you can also use this effect on the background, for example if you wanted to add a little bit of lighting to the background, you're welcome to do it there as well and that will help even out some of the shadows on the background. You can do as many layers as you want then you can use a eraser or a soft brush to blend in these two areas so that the transition is better. I mean that just kind of even out the background a little bit. You're welcome to play around with that if you, if you don't want the background to be a certain exposure, obviously that's going to make the background a little bit brighter down there and bring your viewers eye down there. You may or may not want that effect, but you can't use Dodge and Burn to also accentuate details in the background. It doesn't have to just be for the face and the clothing that's going to be in your shop. But fundamentally that is the dodge and burn technique. It's a great way to add local contrast and also fix the exposure of certain areas in your photo. It's a great technique for you to be able to also relate your image if you made some mistake with your lighting, or you want to add additional lighting effects like a rim light or a different kind of two or three-point lighting. You can also color dodge and burn if you wanted to do. Those are more advanced techniques that I'll probably show in another Skillshare course, but just give me a heads up. Those are possible as well. With this technique, we can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the next set of step I'll see you there. 11. Color Correction: Hello, my friends. Devaun Lennox here and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to cover the color correction and the final color grading part of our workflow. Now, this is typically where you would do the equivalent of doing a white and black point setting those using a threshold in Photoshop, but for this particular workflow in Affinity Photo, that doesn't really work quite as well, so you have to go through a more DIY approach of just doing color correction using your eyes rather than using the info panel and then setting your colors by number. There's a lot of different ways for you to color correct your images and finalize your white balance and you may have noticed I didn't do the white balance when we first did the basics exposures when I first opened up the image in Affinity Photo. It's at the point in the workflow where I do those final color corrections in getting the image, the color grade and color that I'm looking for, rather than the beginning. The way that I shot this, I shot this at a very flat white balance to begin with, so I didn't really need to make that adjustment to warm it up or anything like that. I was going to just come back to that later in the workflow, but you're welcome to set your white balance earlier in the workflow, but I think right now when you're getting to finalizing your image and you're doing the final color correction and your final color grading is a perfect time for you to actually do the color aspect. Now, like I was saying before, there's a lot of ways that you can correct color, especially in Affinity Photo, but I find that the easiest way is by just using the color balance and then just adding various cyan, magenta, or yellow colors to your mid-tones in your highlights or your shadows. For me, I just find that the mid-tones which is going to compose mostly of the skin, it's just a little bit cold, so I'm going to add a little bit more red. I'm not going to go too far on the red, but I find that it was a little bit cold, so I'm going to add maybe 15 on there and then it was a little green as well, so I'm just going to add maybe a minus 5 and I'll show you the before and after. Just warm that up a little bit, which is a little bit green. I just wanted to add a little bit more life to the skin, which is a little bit green and a little bit discolored there. Then for the shadows, you're welcome to add a coloration to the shadows. If you wanted to add more of a blue and give your image more of a coloration effect. I'm going to do a little bit of that, but I'm going to add mostly more of a magenta, reddish purplish vibe and then just the effect globally afterwards. I'm going to give it something like that. Now this is just doing general color grading and I'm just going to drop the opacity of this layer down. I don't want to be quite that obvious, but I want it to be a little bit of a subtle coloration in there. We add a little bit more of a magenta-reddish finish here. Now, in this section as well, I would be going through and I'll do my final skin color corrections as well. I'm going to show you the techniques on how to color correct skin if you have to color correct skin. The way I shot this image, and the fact that I use a beauty dish, the lighting was very even and there weren't really a lot of hues in the different colors that were in the room, so I don't really need to really fix that many colors specifically, but the basic premise is that you're going to open up a new layer in your editing program. You're going to change the blend mode to color, you're also welcome to use average as well. Average, I'll show you that here shortly, but average will also take the surrounding area exposure and then also use that as part of its adjustment for color as well, and then you're going to sample a certain area using the paintbrush, make sure your paintbrush is selected, sample a nice mid-tone value, and then you're going to paint in the other areas that you find that are distracting from the color standpoint. Then what you're going to do is you're going to just adjust the opacity until you find a nice blend between the original skin color that you think is the best color for the model skin and then the problem area. That's basically what you're going to do. The only area in this photo that I would see that would be potentially a problem is just the model's mouth area right here, it's just a little bit green. I'll go on this and I'll just show you what I'm talking about here. In this case, I want something more saturated and then I would paint over this area to warm up this whole area and get rid of that greenish hue from this area and I'm effectively just adding more saturation and now, if I go a lot higher, you can see what I'm talking about here. I go to like 30% and I'll show you the before and after. It just added a little bit of warmth and it got rid of that green tone that was there, but there's another technique that I want to show you. This is something I would do at this part of the workflow, is using a average blend mode layer to even out more tones. For this, you're going to create a new layer. You're going to go up here, change your blend mode from normal to average, which is right here. Average also is like the color layer, but it also takes the exposure of the area that you've selected and it uses that as a baseline and it's a great way for you to finalize the exposure of a certain area and it's a little bit more localized than using dodge and burn. That's part of the reason why I do it here. You'll see what I'm talking about here. It will basically add exposure and color to these areas of the hands. Not only does it even out that area in terms of tone, but it also adds the same color. It's a really interesting shortcut to do two things in one. You can fix an area and make it look a lot more seamless in terms of color and tone. You'll notice that it was darker there and then it also filled in the color. The color from way down here is very similar to the color up here. It's fixing both of those issues for you at once. It's a great little hack. This is actually something that I would do to fix the background, which is what I'm going to do right now. I'm going to go back here, set that from normal to average, and I'm actually going to fix the background to average out the background. This is actually something I would do at this stage of the workflow as well and just paint the background to even out the entire background. Now I'm going to do this really quickly, but it would be a good idea for you to spend some time on this. I'm going to go back. I just want to just change the exposure at the bottom. You can do the entire background this way if you want the background as a whole to be very, very even and this will give you a very professional looking background if you go about doing it this way. You don't have to do the whole background. I'm just going to do the bottom just to get rid of this vignette down here and you'll notice the before and after, it just got rid of all of that and it also evens out the color of the background as well and it makes it more similar to the background that I sampled up here. That's a nice easy hack there for you to get in and do multiple things at once. Let me group the changes that we just made so you can see the before and after. That's before and that's after, and then let's come into the face. We just evened up the tone of the hands there and then we evened up the face. But that's what I would do in this section of the workflow when it comes to your final color management, add a little bit of a color grade. I would then also make sure that the model's face doesn't have uneven colors. Everything is nice and even and then I would make sure if there's hands or clothing, any distractions from the color on the hands, you can go ahead and fix that with the color technique that I showed you before. At this point too, if you wanted to fix up the backdrop or use the average technique to fix up your exposure and your colors simultaneously, this is also an excellent time in the workflow to do that before we finalize and we add our sharpening and then we export our image for the web or for print. We can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the next set of steps, so I'll see you there. 12. Sharpening : Hello my friends and welcome back. In this video, we're going to sharpen our photo to get it ready for exporting. Now, there's a lot of ways to sharpen your images when it comes to Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and here in Affinity Photo. But I find that the easiest way by far is going to be using the unsharpen mask. That's going to allow you to have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you're applying the sharpening, but then also your threshold and the settings of the sharpening that you're applying to your image. I'm going to show you how to set that particular function up. But like I said, there are many other ways that you can sharpen your images. First, what you have to do is basically select all of your images and you're going to create a new layer. Because these filters that we're going to apply can only work on a rasterize flattened layer. They don't work on multiple layers, they have to be flattened and rasterized. Also, you're going to select all the layers here in Affinity Photo, come up here and then we're going to hit "Merge Visible". That's going to create a new top layer of all the layers that we selected below it. Then we're going to come over to our filters tab. We're going to scroll down and hit "Unsharp Mask". Now, what you're going to do is set your factor, which is the equivalent of the amount slider in Adobe Photoshop. You're going to set that to 50 percent and then use a radius between one and two pixels. I'm just going to just set it to two pixels, but you can set it to one if you want a more subtle sharpen effect. Then what you're going to do is adjust the threshold, so that it just adds the sharpening just to the model's eyes, eyebrows, and a little bit of the hair. Because this is going to be some of the elements that are going to be the furthest, I guess, towards the camera's plane. They're going to be fasten out. You're going to just adjust the sharpening until we're just starting to get the lid there. You can use it before and after to make this easier to see what's happening here. You don't want to be sharpening too much of the hair, but at same time you want to make sure it's sharpening the eyes and the lips. I'm probably going to go back down to about 15, where it's adding an effect. Maybe I can go down a little bit further and make it a little bit more powerful. Maybe 12, it's definitely adding effect on that. You can see it right over here on the eyelashes. Then we're going to hit "Apply" and that's fundamentally all you have to do. Now the only other thing of note, you may want to change this from a normal blend mode to luminosity. Sometimes when you apply these sharpening effects, sometimes they can also add coloration, usually a purple fringing to the halos and it causes discoloration to the sharpening. If you want to avoid that or you're noticing that by using the Unsharp Mask in your application, you should change the blend mode to luminosity. It only applies basically in exposure change, exposure and a color change. But that's fundamentally all we're going to do to sharpen our image. We can start to move into the next part of the post-production workflow. In the next lesson we're going to cover the next set of steps. I'll see you there. 13. Exporting: Hello my friends. Devon Lennox here and welcome to our final lesson in the post-production workflow. Now we're going to export our image both as a high resolution JPEG for our archives, and as a web ready image that we could post up on social media. The easiest way to export an Affinity Photo is going to be going up here to our main menu and hitting ''Export.'' Now, you have a lot of settings and file formats that you could export to. However, the best file format to export out of Affinity Photo that's going to maximize both image quality and then also reduce the final file size, so you'll get an image file that's 25, 30, or 100 megabytes in size or larger, is going to be a JPEG. You could use a PNG, but they get pretty large. You could use a TIFF, but they also get pretty large as well, and then there's not really gigantic benefit on this. You're going to go into Photoshop or Illustrator to use any of these other formats they're very much for exporting to other applications. But since we're just exporting just to save the image for our own archives, all you've to have to do is hit the JPEG option right here. I'll leave the dimensions as set from your camera, which should be around 4,000 by 6,000 pixels. Image quality, I'm going to leave that maximized at 100%. Now you're welcome to play around with the ICC profile, which is going to be your color profile. I would suggest just leaving it as sRGB, which is one of the options that you could select when you set up your canvas in the beginning. You are welcome to put it to Adobe RGB if you have a monitor that's calibrated for Adobe RGB, or if you want to just use DCI-P3 if you have an Apple device that supports that format. However, for most of us, sRGB is going to be the best option. Then once you select that Affinity will provide your final file size and all you've to do is hit ''Okay,'' and you can save it to any location on your iPad. I'll just set it in here, and I'll just put it in procreate for the time being. You can just save it there, and replace. Then boom, now we have our exported JPEG image that's ready for our backup. Now, how do you export for social media? Same processes as before. Go to main menu at export, then we're going to make sure JPEG is selected. The only difference here is that you're going to adjust this quality slider until you get the final file size down here by generating preview to be below one megabytes in size. That's going to be around 50%. Let's go to 49. We're going to just make sure that file size is less than one megabyte, so 950 kilobytes should be fine. Then we're going to hit ''Okay,'' and we can save that in the same folder as before. I'm just going to come over here and just type in one and hit ''Save.'' There you are. Now you've exported both your high resolution JPEG for your backup in archival purposes, but you've also exported a high-quality JPEG that is smaller in file size that's great for sharing on the web. That now concludes our full post-production workflow, and you now have all the steps on how to finalize your image and take it to a truly professional level. 14. Closing Thoughts: There you have it my friends. There's budget friendly beauty photography at home broken down from start to finish. I want to say thank you for taking the time to watch this class. I hope the techniques and skills I showcase throughout this class have helped you meaningfully, and I hope they've proven that any of us can capture magazine worthy images. Of course, there's still plenty of value in renting or purchasing a commercial studio space. But the reality is that you can replicate these results at home without forking out another mortgage in the process. There's also no reason why you have to use the highest quality equipment or gear for this form of photography either. Anyone can do this. It's just a matter of knowing the basic techniques and having a confident workflow. From there find a good models and practice. But either way, you're now fully equipped to tackle this medium. We covered the necessary tools like lights, your camera setup, the best practices with them, what to consider both on set and beforehand, and the full post-processing workflow. It's up to you to take the baton from here and go forth and show your vision to the world. Speaking of showing your vision to the world, your class project is to upload your own beauty editorial shoot. I encourage you to get creative and also not to be a perfectionist, especially if this is your first attempt at this medium. I also welcome you to post any works in progress or even a fully completed projects from years prior. Either way, the goal is for us to learn and grow together. If you have any feedback or follow-up questions though for us regarding this class, please let me know by reaching out here through Skillshare. I look forward to publishing more courses on this platform and continue helping you create your vision. With that said though, I've been your host Devaun Lennox and I'll see you next time.