Headshot Photography: Money Making Portraits Made Easy!

1. Introduction: The headshot. Everyone needs one, but not all are created equal. Hello and welcome. My name is Fynn Badgley. I'm a commercial portrait and fashion photographer located in Toronto, Canada and today, I'm welcoming you to the only headshot class you will ever need. Throughout my photography career, I've taken headshots for actors, lawyers, politicians, CEOs, and more. The approach to all of these is so different yet so similar. The headshot is not just your standard portrait. It's something that shows you at your best self and usually is done to get you work. So ultimately, you want to make sure whoever is in front of your camera is going to get more jobs from that photo. But how do you do it? Throughout this class, we're going to break down every component of the headshot. We're going to talk about lighting, both natural light and artificial light so you are ready for any situation. I'm even including my Number 1 go-to setup for headshots. It doesn't stop there. We're going to talk about posing, how to make somebody feel comfortable in front of the camera, and the scientific techniques that will actually help people look better on camera. Beyond the technical, I'm even giving you some money-making strategies so that way you can make bank off of headshots. To wrap it all up, we're even going to be talking about retouching and some best practices to have people looking [inaudible]. I'm also including a bunch of do's and don'ts of headshots so that way you don't fall into any of the pitfalls that many photographers do, starting out. I'm even guilty of a couple of these myself. Now without further ado, if you're ready to take some great headshots, let's get going. 2. Defining the Headshot: Firstly, I'd like to thank you for taking part in this class. Let's start off by defining the head shot as well as what you're going to be creating at the end of this class. The headshot is essentially you're putting your best face forward. It's capturing you looking like yourself in the best possible way so that people can see who they're dealing with. Whether you're an actor, a doctor, a lawyer, somebody working at a tech company, or even just looking for new jobs on LinkedIn, you need a great head shot. But the difference between a good and a great headshot are in the details, which is what we're going to discuss later on. For now, let's focus on the project that you will come away with at the end of this class. We are going to be taking one headshot of somebody in your life could be your friend, could be your spouse, could be your sister, your brother, could be anybody in your life. You're going to take one headshot of them and describe the situation. Was it natural light? Did you light the scene? How did you find the process? Provide as much information as you can and I will do my best to give you the most amount of feedback I can as well. Make sure to chime down in the discussion tabs if you have any questions whatsoever because I will make sure to chime in and answer those to the best of my abilities. Now with that all said, let's actually go over some things to do and not to do when both preparing your client for a headshot and preparing yourself. 3. Do's and Don'ts: The devil's in the details and head-shots were no exception. There are a bunch of do's and don'ts that can make or break a headshot. Let's go through a little list of things to do for your client. For the person in front of your camera, you're not really going to want anything too loud, too busy, too distracting, that will take away from the focus of their face. Now, that said, it depends on what the headshot is for, who the person is. A creative headshot is going to look completely different than a politician's headshot. For example if I were a politician, this shirt probably would not work for a headshot. But if I were a creative, if I were a designer, then it would work a lot better. Actors, creatives, they have a lot more freedom in the expression they can give on camera, as opposed to say, lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc. There are a couple of different camps and it's best to talk with your client to figure out who they are, who their audience is, what the purpose of their headshot is so that way you can make sure they are best prepared for that. If your client is doing their own hair and makeup, you want them to keep it quite minimal and light. Think like a no makeup, makeup look. If you're working with a makeup artist, tell them you want more of that no makeup, makeup look or very subtle, something very natural that will translate well on camera and not be too distracting. This can be nudged if you're an actor looking for an additional look, which is an additional photo in your packages where you are more glammed up, you are more bold if that's the character you're trying to audition for. But that's really the only case that I would suggest something like that. Unless you're a really bold, creative person and that is part of your personality, and that is something you want to show through in your headshot. These are things you can talk about in a consultation, but the general rule of thumb, nothing too distracting, nothing too loud, no distracting patterns, etc. Now for you behind the camera, what you want to do is keep your background pretty plain and minimal. What I'm doing here is I have a plain white backdrop setup and that's going to be our main background for today. If you're shooting outside, you want to keep the background out of focus so you will want to photograph at a wider aperture, probably somewhere between F4 to 2.8. You could maybe stop down a little bit if it's quite bright. But you wouldn't really want to go too far beyond that as the background will start having too much information and will become a little busy. There are exceptions to this for the creative field, you can have different colored backgrounds or create additional looks with more dramatic backgrounds, more vibrant backgrounds, if that's something that your client requests. These are all just general rules of thumb. That said, on technical side, I wouldn't really photograph at anything wider than a 50 millimeter lens, because at this point you're going to get too much distortion for a typical headshot that you're shooting from about the mid section to the top of somebody's head. If you were doing an environmental portrait, that's a different story, but we're not covering those in today's class. This is just talking about a nice clean headshot, shows your face clean and simple and that's how we want to keep it. You'd probably ideally want to be using an 85 millimeter, which is actually what I'm going to be using today. Now that said, you don't have to use an 85. You can get away with a zoom or different focal lengths just I would stay somewhere between 50-135. On the longer end, say like a 200 millimeter lens, you're going to get a little bit too much compression and it'll flatten the face a little bit too much, which we don't really want either. Too much wider than a 50 millimeter and you're going to start having a lot of distortion going on in the face, which isn't going to translate well on camera, it's going to make the person look a little weird, which is what we don't want. Speaking of don'ts, more things you will want to avoid is having your client have too many baggy clothes, that sort of thing where the clothes just aren't fitted. It's always good to have well fitted clothing, the seam is at the shoulders, it falls well, it looks nice on you, it's flattering because it will come across as more flattering on camera. If ever anything is too baggy, too wide, isn't as form fitting as needed, you can use a little trick that we use so much in fashion photography and that is taking one of these and all you do is you take the excess fabric at the back, you pull it like so and you just clip it. What that will do, is it will synch everything in so it looks more form, fitted, although you just usually want to suggest your client would have formed fitting clothing so you don't have to do this, but if it ends up happening, this is how you can fix that in a pinch. Little trade secret there for you. [NOISE] Something I always keep in my back pocket. Lastly, headshots aren't really the place that you want to try out new lighting or camera techniques. You want to keep it simple. The lighting setup that I'm going to demonstrate for you, a very simple one light setup. There's going to be two variations of it, but I can use them for any headshot and get a clean, great photo of somebody every single time because that's the idea. I'm not going to be using crazy over the top lighting setups because that's not what the intent is for here. There are times where you can add more light and create a more advanced setup, but it's not the time to play with really bold dramatic lighting, to bring out the colored gels, to try using a fisheye lens. This is the time to stick with the basics and get a real clean headshot of somebody because it's not about the lighting techniques, it's not about the camera techniques. At the end of the day, for me, it's about the person on the other side of your lens and how you can capture them authentically and make them feel comfortable in front of the camera. All the fun technical bits that us photographers love to dive into, we'll just put those on the back burner for now. Talking about clothing, one thing you'll want to avoid is anything with a very heavy texture to it. Any really textured clothing is going to create a phenomenon in digital cameras, especially that is called moiree. What this is, is when the camera sensor picks up the pattern and if it's too condensed, it will get confused and then you will start seeing weird patterns show up in the clothing and we don't want this. Things to avoid sometimes can be anything that's knit, anything that's ribs, anything that has a lot of texture to it. Houndstooth is bad for this as well. These are some things to maybe avoid or if your client comes with a couple of different looks, maybe those will be ones that you suggest we leave off to the side for the time being. Now, it isn't always the case. I photographed ribbed and knit textures before and never had an issue, but it depends on the camera sensor and it very much depends on the actual pattern of whatever you're photographing. Sometimes finer patterns will come out more, sometimes they won't. It's really on a case-by-case basis. Now, with all that said, I'm going to jump behind the camera and we're going to walk through a very simple natural light setup before we bring out the lights and talk about how we can get a great one light setup. 4. Natural Light: To start working, just going to go over the natural light section. We're not going to worry too much about posing or anything fancy for this. It's going to be pretty simple. We have a lot of light coming in through the windows, so we're just going to set up a standard headshot. Again, nothing too fancy off the bat, and then we'll build upon it in the later lessons. I'm joined today by Van Eyck and we're going to go through a couple of different setups. Honestly, she's done this enough times where I don't have to really give her any instruction, but I'm still going to as we go through this so you get a sense of how to actually direct somebody to be better on camera. She's already in place. I'm going to set behind the camera and then we're going to start working from there. Now, I already know this, but what side do you prefer? We're going to focus on having that side more favorite to the camera. We'll get a couple other shots in there as well, just for some variation, especially because she is an actor. These things are important to consider, especially in that she's going to be going for additions for different characters. She wants to show different sides of ourselves. It's something that's important, whereas, for a business professional, it's irrelevant. Pretty much already framed or up for how she's going to be standing here. I'm going to be posting all the settings here as we go through the different photos because I know for some photographers that's something that they like to look at to see what we're working with. We've got a lot of natural light coming in through the windows. Honestly, if you have just a room with some window light, this is a great way to take a super simple headshot. You can either have the windows to the side of your subject like I do here, wrapping around the face or you can have them behind you, in front of your subject, lighting them that way. Personally, I like taking my headshots more from a horizontal perspective because it's easier to crop in to a vertical shot for 8 by 10 if you need to versus the other way around. Also, something that I think is important is to tether to an iPad, to a laptop so that way your subject can see the photos as they're coming in. It's something that adds little value to the client and it's something that I've always noticed is appreciated. First, you're just going to stare straight on at me. Perfect. Great. You can see the way the light's coming here. It's creating a nice side light on her face that wraps around naturally to the other side, something that you may want to do if you have Windows to the side like this, is you can just grab a little reflector, put it on the opposing side of her face and just add a little more light in there. You can see that it just evens things out a bit. She still has the highlight on the light side of her face, but it's just bringing up the shadows on the other side a little bit. I'm just giving you some basic posing instructions so you guys can see what I'm thinking here. I'm going to go a lot more in-depth posing in the later lessons but this is just what we're working with to start off and just narrow the eyes a little bit for me. If I move one. Yes, please do. That's something that I always find is important no matter who your subject is, to ask or you adjust anything on them. Some people would prefer that they adjusted themselves. Some people don't care. It's always important just to have that comfortability with whoever is in front of your camera. It's something that I really value and it's something that I've had clients comment on that they appreciate it. We'll take a couple more here. But honestly, for a natural light shot, this is a clean simple headshot. Now, based on the way the light is coming through the side, we're not getting as much light in the eyes. It doesn't have as much as I would personally like. Especially being an actor, you may want to make things pop a little bit more. That's when we're actually going to bring up the lights, change up the vibe a little bit and make things a little punchier. As well as we have a little more control of the light in that scenario. Without further ado, we're going to jump over, get some light setup and I'll talk through the 1-2 main setups that I use for just about every headshot ever. 5. One Light Setups: We're going to go through two different artificial light setups here. Both of these are one-light setups and it's basically just comes down to personal preference for whichever one you prefer. The first one we're going to do is a 45-degree angle with the light, and then we're going to do more of a butterfly lighting setup where it's top right, almost at the forehead of our subject. Then we can move around the reflector in different positions to help even out the face there. To start with, especially because her best side is on her left, I'm going to light that side, not just favorite to the camera, but I'm also going to light that side, so it comes across more prominent and that's more what your eye is going to be drawn to when you're looking at the photo. Now for the purposes of this class, I'm going to be using constant light so we don't have to worry about flashes and settings and all this stuff, and you can actually see what the light is doing as I'm adjusting things. Because with flash, it's a whole different beast. I have another class on that, you can check it out if you want. But right now we're just focusing on what the light is actually doing and making the headshot look the best it possibly can. We're just using a constant light with a nice large diffuser here. This is a lantern-style softbox, I like it because it gives a nice round catch light in the eyes, so they don't have a weird square or you don't have the hard edges of something like an octa box. Then we're just going to keep that reflector on the shadow side of her face just to bring that up a little bit and you want to angle it, so you see where the light is and you catch it and bring it back into the shadows of her face, even things out a little bit there. I'm going to jump behind the camera and see what we're working with. I will absolutely have to adjust my settings because this light, it's a lot brighter than the ambient light that we're getting in from the window. Right now we're going to keep it simple. If you keep your hair back on the one side and just turn the chair around to me. We can see if we compare this to the natural lighting setup, the light becomes a little more flattering. It sculpts her facial features a little bit better. We're getting a nice catch light in the eye. It's a little more frontal than we have a window, and also we can control it a little better. I haven't raised up a little higher, so what we're doing is we're getting a nice little shadow from her jaw here, accentuating that jawline. We're getting some of the cheekbone features in there, really accentuating these natural features that she already has. I can show you if we take the reflector away, suddenly, the face has a lot more shadow to it. Now, this might be great, if you want this moody, dramatic headshot, we don't want that. That's why we're going to bring in the reflector to bring up the shadows on the other side of her face and just make the light a lot more flattering for this style of headshot. We can see why the difference is important there and why it's important to actually use a reflector in your lighting setups because you can easily get away with one light. But you'll often have to bring up the shadows a lot in post-production, or you'll have to play with a lot more to have the face evenly lit. We're still getting enough dimension where it's not really a flat light at all, nothing is really washed out. But we're also getting things that aren't too dramatic, aren't too harsh. You don't really want to be using harsh lighting here, so I have a very soft lighting modifier that is close to her face, which is going to create a nice soft, flattering light. Now that we've gone over the side lighting setup, we're going to have the light positioned more near her forehead as a butterfly lighting setup, and this is going to create just a more central light. We're not lighting one side of her face, we're going to light her entire face in and of itself, and then we're going to get a nice little shadow under the nose, under the lip. It's a classic great one-light setup. Then we'll probably thread the reflector in just beneath to open up some of the shadows under her chin and that thing. Now you'll notice I am mostly just working off of a tripod here. I don't always do this. Sometimes I'll come in closer and probably in the later lessons when we get going a lot more in terms of different poses and different looks, then I'll start moving around a little bit more. But sometimes it's also great to just lock off your camera on a tripod, and then rather than having somebody stare through the camera, you're able to talk with them and having more natural report because they can make more of a connection to you versus just looking into the lens. Granted, they should be looking into the lens for the actual photos, but you can have more of a rapport with them based on them being able to see your face. With that said, now that we've got our setup going on here I'm going to then jump behind the camera, and we can see the difference between these two setups, and maybe you can start to get a feel for which one you would prefer if you were to take one setup and use it for just about all of your headshots. Now I will have to adjust my camera position slightly because I currently have a reflector and a stand in my shot, so just same thing, just a little bit of a 45, and then bring your chin round. Chin up just a bit for me. Perfect. That looks great. You can see the difference between the two different setups there. What I like about this one is it accentuates the cheekbones a little more because you're getting more of that shadow coming down, versus the side lighting setup where you have a bit of a different look across the face. Both of these can be used in entirely different circumstances and I've even had it before where a client will come to me with a headshot that they have for their team already, but they add somebody new to their team. They're like, can you make this look like everything else that we've already shot with a completely different photographer, and I have to quickly look at where the light is, analyze it through, looking in their eyes, seeing where the light is, and then replicate the setup and then get a headshot that looks somewhat similar where you can't really tell them apart. This is a way that these setups, you can rejig them how you need to be able to do something like that if you're ever in that scenario. You can lean your chin up a little bit like you did before. Nice. Great. Squint the eyes a little. Nice. [LAUGHTER] Now we've shown you a couple of great setups to get a headshot. Whether you like natural light, whether you like artificial light, whether you want to light them from the side, from above, and use a bit of a fill either on the other side or beneath just to lift up those shadows. But honestly, the main thing in a headshot is the expression and the pose because it will take a good or an okay headshot and make it a great headshot. It's something that I put more time into compared to lighting and camera techniques because honestly, that's the simple part. This is the easy part. The actual communication with your subject and posing them is what makes it more difficult. Without further ado, let's jump over there and show you a couple of different ways to get different looks out of your subject and really convey what they're looking for out of their headshot. 6. Posing the Face: Now we're going to go through the different parts of posing for a headshot. You may think it's pretty simple, but you can break it down in a way that you isolate different parts of the body to make it more complex in a way that you can make just about anyone look good on camera. It's something that you don't have to be necessarily conventionally attractive. These are techniques that I've used on a wide range of people to make them look their best, and they work with just about everyone that I found. We're going to go through some of those. We're going to break down posture, we're going to break down eyes, mouth, lips, shoulders, hands, because everyone always says, what do I do with my hands, and you're going to get the answer here as well. Just hands. Then we're also going to focus on creating an overall mood through how you pose your subject. I'm going to jump behind the camera and we're going to start going through all of this. Now, something to keep in mind as you're doing this is how do you want the person to come across. How do they want to come across? Because a business professional might hold back some energy that you might get from a creative, from an actor, from a dancer. We'll start from you standing at essentially a mugshot. I'm going to have you stand at a 45-degree with your right shoulder more towards the background, so your left shoulder more toward me. It depends on personal preference and your client, but I usually like to have everyone standing up. There's a little more energy that way. Some people prefer to have people sit on an apple box or an opposing stool, something like that. But I like standing. Now I'll have you bring your chin around to me. Perfect. Now, if we're talking about posture, something that we don't want is really broad shoulders, and we also don't want it like you're completely trying to pop your chest out. Like you're posturing gorilla or something. You want a dancer pose. Exactly. Now, you already know how to do this. But something that I'll often instruct people is, imagine there's a string running from the top of your head, like right at the crown of your head, to the base of your spine. You have this nice, straight even posture. If you're not sure of how to get your shoulders right, what I'll often get you to do is bring your shoulders up towards your ears, bring them back, and then drop them. That's pretty much a good resting neutral posture where you're going to look like you're upright, you're not slouched. Now that we have posture covered, we're going to go into the eyes and how you can change up how you look at the camera to convey different emotions and different themes. First off, yes, you absolutely want to close your eyes so that everyone thinks you're asleep or you blinked. Exactly. Precisely. First, give me deer in the headlights. Exactly. Completely surprised. This is pretty much what you don't want and also what a lot of people do and they stand in front of a camera. They're like, I am not used to this. What do I do? Wait. This is the actual face. Exactly. We're trying to get away from that. We're trying to make our subjects comfortable, trying to get them in a more natural state. There's a whole bunch of little muscles underneath your eyelids here and we're just going to flex those into what some people may refer to as the smize. Some people have different terms for it, but this is essentially what it is. If you just narrow your eyes a little bit. It's not a full squint. It's not anything like that. It's just compressing them a little bit so you get this nice confident look. Already, even with a neutral face, we can see that that is so much better than the complete deer in the headlights or this uncomfortable lock head Completely changes it. Confidence comes from the eyes, but approachability can really come from your mouth and your lips. We're going to go through a couple of different ways to express that. Now, most people have a default smile they will go to and they use it for everything. Because of this, they don't really vary it up too much and if you tell somebody to smile, they're going to give you the same smile every single time. But there's different ways that you can change this up. A technical way that people have explained this is by sounding out different vowels while smiling. But there's also other ways that you can do it. Basically, if I were to get you to give me your regular smile, what would that be? See? Perfect. That's a great, nice smile. Show the teeth. It's always a great look. Now if I got you to do a closed-mouth smile. See? Also a great look. Now you'll notice instinctively she's already doing this. Some people you may have to instruct them to as well. She's already paying attention to her eyes and making sure that they come across the right way while she's smiling. You have it in the mouth and in the eyes because if you're just smiling with your mouth, it's like when you're holding a smile for too long and you're waiting for somebody to take the photo. That's when you just end up looking super uncomfortable and you're just playing the waiting game. Yes, Precisely. Have you relax your face. Now if we want a more neutral expression, there's different things that we can do here as well. If I just have you do a complete resting face. Great. Now I'll have you separate your lips a little bit, like almost if you are to show a little bit of teeth in-between. Yeah. Perfect. Exactly. A little bit sly. Then you can also play with your actual direction of your body. Right now, a good rule of thumb that I usually have is you stand to about a 45-degree angle to the camera, bring your chin around, do it like that. But now that we've established a couple of different ways to move your mouth, you can have a full-teeth smile, a more relaxed closed-mouth smile. You can have a resting face, you can have something where you're separating your lips a little bit, you can have a bit of a smirk, you can play with your eyes. Now we're going to actually change up how we're standing so we get different looks. We're going to play with our chin position and change that. Sometimes you might be looking up a little more, you might be looking down a little more, and all of these are going to give you a completely different look. Some people will prefer different sides of themselves and some of these photos might be from an angle that they've never even seen of themselves and they love. 7. Refining Body Position: Where do you want my hair? We've taken a lot with one side over so we can do them behind now. This is something too. You can switch up the hair position and all these things to get different looks so you have more variety there. Now, something I'm going to have you do while you're standing is if you take your arms and face your palms outward like that. Exactly. And what this does is it just modifies the shoulder rotation so it just looks a little more flattering on camera and this works for literally everyone. Something that I've seen people do if you want it more exaggerated, is you hold your hands up to your sides and you bring them out like so. But there's a more comfortable way to do so is just to have them down at your sides and throw them out. I like the resting mouth. Can you turn a little bit this way? Nice. And something I'll do as well while taking headshots of people is I like to make a fool of myself a little bit so that way I can get a genuine laugh out of them and it's usually after a good laugh that you'll get a more authentic smile out of somebody. And I'll get you to turn a little more this way with your body, and then shun up and turn a little bit. If I'm here, you have your chin up and. Over. The exact thing, exactly. You know the thing. And separate your lips a little bit for me. Beautiful. And gives me just a little smirk. Excellent. Bring your chin around this way a little bit more. Perfect. Chin up a bit, and give me a resting face. There, the eyes a little bit. And now little more straight onto me with your body. Perfect. And you can see even as she's moving is as she comes straight on with her body, her chin still moves so we're not getting that mugshot look. You want to be independently moving all of these parts of your body and directing your subject to move these parts of your body so you keep things fluid, you keep things moving. It creates a smoother operation of things where your just one pose flows into the next and you're just going about it. Something I usually like to do is I'll have some music going on in the background while we're doing this, but obviously. [inaudible]. Exactly, give me a little more to the side. Bring the chin around and look up a little bit. And now give me the look. Perfect. Chin around this way just a little bit. Beautiful. And separate your lips a little bit for me. Turn a little more straight onto me. And now tilt the head like this. Beautiful. Now give me a soft smile. Perfect. Now give me a big toothy smile. That's great. Now also to answer the question of what do I do with my hands? Something that I usually do is just have them either out to the side or down at the bottom, rotated out. Something that I try to never do. Jazz hands. I would rather jazz hands than this, having your arms crossed. Because what that does is it closes off your body and if somebody is looking to hire you, looking to work with you, they really probably don't want you to come across as defensive. And having your arms crossed is a defensive position to be in. Cross your arms for me, you can see here, [LAUGHTER] the photo just comes across as defensive, but when you have your arms crossed like this, it completely shuts you off. Some people feel more comfortable doing it, but it's because they're in an uncomfortable situation, and crossing your arms is giving yourself a hug so your comfort in yourself, which is why a lot of people go to do it naturally but it's one of my least favorite poses to do ever of all time. If you can avoid it, just don't do it. If your client really wants a couple of crossed-arm ones, throw them in there, but I strongly advise against it. If you're doing a wider shot, you can have them lean on something if they want to do that. But literally just standing with your arms at your side for a headshot is completely fine. You don't need your hands up by your face or anything like that because this is mainly about your face. It's not about the rest of you, it's a headshot. Exactly. It's not like a beauty campaign. You're not going to have rings everywhere. Precisely. If you know, you know. And you'll notice I'm pretty much shooting at eye level with her, I'm not going too much below, because then we start getting into like under-chin action. And then I'm not going too far up either because not only is it going to mess with the perspective, but it's also going to minimize whoever is in front of your lens. If you shoot from below, typically you make the person look more powerful, if you shoot from above, you make them look smaller and less powerful. When you shoot them at eye level, you meet them where you're at, and for a headshot where you're trying to see somebody as they are, that's a perfect spot to be. If you're photographing the CEO and they want to appear super powerful like they've just conquered the world, then maybe, yeah, you would shoot them from below, but that would be more so for an editorial or advertising shoot, not for a headshot. Now, if you've been following along until this point, you'll be able to use natural light to the best of your ability to get a great shot whether using window light. Or something else you can do is if you're outside, just find a shaded area and try to keep the brighter spot in front of your subject. If you're under an overhang or in shadow, if you're in the shade, try to keep the sun in front of that person so it's going to be lighting them from the front, and that's if you're taking headshots of somebody outside and if you do, you just want to have a background that's not super cluttered. But you also have the knowledge of using multiple different one-light setups that you can pull out in a pinch to create a great headshot within seconds. But more importantly than that, you have the tools, you know how to pose people in front of your camera to get a great headshot. You can use the different parts of their body to really create a mood and get a different feeling, as well as just being able to make your model, whoever is in front of your camera, feel comfortable. Now, with all that said, we're going to do some mild retouching on these photos. So we're going to go into the edit and do that. I want to give a big thank you to [inaudible] for all her help throughout this class. Her information will be linked in the description down below, so check her out. As well as she is an actor, performer, dancer, singer, multi-talented, brilliant individual. So thank you for coming out. And make sure to follow the rest of the lessons to see not only how to edit the photos that you've taken, but also how to make money from them. 8. Image Culling and Global Edits: Now, it's a little bit later, and it's time to get into the edit and actually retouch some of these photos. To keep things simple, we only really need to retouch one photo, and then take the same principles and apply it to any other photos that we'd be retouching throughout this shoot. If you have multiple looks, you would just take a similar edit and do the same treatment across each photo. Now, different photographers have different ways that they like to work, but usually what I would do is cull through. Essentially, culling is just going through the good and the bad photos, taking out the ones where there's blinking, weird expressions, people's eyes are half-open, stuff like that. Just taking that out of there and then narrowing it down to the general ones that are good, possible, if you will. And then from there, we'll go export those as a low-res JPEG, maybe with a watermark, upload those to a client gallery. There's a bunch of different ones that are offered by different websites and different services, and then you can send those to your client where they can go through and pick however many photos you have for them to pick. And then from there I will go through, and also have a couple of my personal favorites, some that I have already rated in Lightroom. I like using a four-star for a this is really good I might deliver this one. A five-star is if they were just like, "I don't really want to bother, you pick the photos." The 5-star may only be one photo, it might be two, three, maybe five if the shoot went really well. But I try to save my fives for really stand-out images. Here, I have a couple of four-star ones that we see. Some great expression here. Very nice neutral face. Honestly, if I were to pick a couple of different expressions, this would be a great one to go with, as well as something like this. Too similar but different looks that I just love, and then you can see how you can change up the expression here from the different ones. I like this a little bit better than this. I think her chin placements better the expression. It's subtle, but it's a little bit better in my opinion, and we're getting more of the focus on her. I feel like there's a little bit too much headroom here. I'm not a fan of a ton of headroom, I like to let it breathe a little bit, but not too much. And then we can see a little bit of a smirk pulled in here. I want between a couple of these. Here, I feel like it's a little more neutral, and then we've got the nice teeth smile, which is great. But I feel like this image for me just really stands out. It just has an overall feeling, and that's what I aim for. You look for technical things in a photo, but you also look for the feeling, and I think this image really gives me that feeling. I'm going to go ahead and edit this one. Going through, I'm going to do some basic adjustments in Lightroom, and then we're going to take it over to Photoshop, do a little bit more, show you some different techniques if you were to do something on a photo like this, and maybe a little extra. So we're going to jump in here, and overall, I think the color correction is pretty on-point, so I'm not really going to have to mess around with that at all. I will bring the highlights down a little bit just to bring back some of that skin tone up here where we get the highlight from that light position, and then we can bring up the shadows just a little bit here. Sometimes I'll drag it farther than I have to and then drag it back down, so we can more or less find the edge there. And then I can hit Option or Alt on the keyboard, click on the whites, and then I can drag that up until we see what's going to be blown out there, and I'll just bring it back down a little bit more. That can give us a good white point. I feel like that's a little bit too much for my liking, so I'm just going to bring that back. We can do the same with the blacks. When you see that detail. Bring it back a little bit more, and we can do something like that. Sometimes I'll come in here and add an overall little S curve, take down the highlights, bring up the shadows a bit, and add some contrast in there. It gives it more of that filmic classic feel. You can see if we switch that on and off. I think we maybe went a little too hardcore, especially on the highlights there. I'm just going to dial that back a little bit. Now, back up we're looking at clarity, texture D Hayes or that stuff. I'm not really going to, you can really hit the texture, and you can see all those glorious pores on anyone's skin. I'm not really going to play around with that too much. Honestly, I think her skin looks fantastic here so I'm not really going to need to do much retouching at all on that front. I'm not going to pull back the clarity, I'm not going to do anything like that because it just may end up looking a little bit weird, in my opinion. And for color grading, if I do anything, I will keep it very, very minimal. I'm going to try pumping up the saturation in different areas to see what her skin tone is like, if it's a little pinky. I'm not really noticing a lot of pink in her skin. Mine personally has more of it, so I would take the reds and bring them into the orange. But at this point for her skin tone, it's just going to change the lip color, and I don't really want that. I can maybe keep it a five so any of those really rosy areas are blended in a little bit nicer, but that's about all I'll do there. For some general color grading, I like to do this more so with more stylized portraits where you're given an overall feel. I'm going to try a little something here that I do on some of my photos just to see what will happen. I'm putting a little bit of purple into the shadows, not a lot, just a little bit. Then overall, we'll give it a global offset that just warms up the photo a little bit more. We can see here I'm not using a lot, the saturation there is about nine. And if I turn that on and off, you can see it just warms up her skin a little bit and those undertones give it a nice balance and give it a bit of a mood that I think works really well for this particular photo. Her eyes stand out really well. Some people like to brighten them up a little bit. Me, personally, I think they stand out enough where I don't really have to, but maybe we'll do that later in Photoshop as well. I think her hair color and eye color really complement each other here. I think for Lightroom, quite honestly, I'm pretty happy there. And then from there we're going to open Photoshop. We're going to go photo edit in Adobe Photoshop, and then from there we're going to do a little more specific retouching, which is what I usually use Photoshop for anyways. We're going to do a little bit of highlight and contouring, and maybe some minor skin retouching as well. 9. Retouching in Photoshop: Now something I'll usually do with more fashion or stylized portrait photo shoots is all do what's called frequency separation for the skin retouching. But I don't really know if I need to do that here her skin is looking really nice. I might just come in here with the healing brush on a new layer and then I'm going to do is use content aware up here, sample all layers. Then I'm just going to go over any little spots on the face and just clean those up. This is just a really quick way to take some of these out. It's not anything that's too intensive. I don't like going hardcore because I find usually with headshots, it's not really what you want to do. Anyways you want to keep it pretty natural and true to how the person looks, so that way, whoever is booking them, whoever is hiring them, it's like what you see is what you get and the only thing you're mitigating is just little skin things that come and go, something like acne. If you have a flare up or something like that as everyone does, this is just a way to take that down a little bit. Got a little something just down here. Little red spot there. That's fine. You can take that out spot there. It's nothing crazy. It's just a little bit, I want to keep it really natural and light here. I'm not going to really do a ton of skin retouching. Something here, Van Eyck mentioned that her hair, she has been getting it colored and recently her roots have been growing in and they're a little darker. We're going to actually re-color those roots so they look like how she would more likely be to arrive at an audition or something like that where her hair is more likely to match. We can do this rename our previous layer skin. Then this new layer will be hair color spelled with a U because I am Canadian. Then we can come in here B for the brush tool on the keyboard and we're going to hit Alt or option. That brings up our color picker and then we can click on the hair color, which is going to select it down here. You can see it's pretty close. Then with a very low flow, high opacity. Opacity means every pass, every click of it. Every click of the mouse you do is you paint over anything that's going to add that percentage in versus flow, adds it in as you brush back over it. You can do one continuous click and brush it back over time. That's what I'm doing here. You can see that's one pass. Then I can pass over and again and again add more of it in there. What I'm doing here is I'm just painting over areas where that color is currently lacking so you can see some of the root areas here. Little darker spots along the route line. I'm just painting over it and don't worry. I know it looks really bad right now. It doesn't look anything like how it should, but we will fix that in T-minus about 15 seconds. We've gone over there, maybe we can do a little bit down here, just looking for any areas where we might meet more of it. Then we're going to come to our blending mode, which is where it says normal. Then we're going to change that and we are going to go to color. We can see immediately that blends in really well, but I'm just going to take it down a little bit on the opacity so it blends in nicer and it's not just a stark pure color. We can see that blends pretty much seamlessly with the rest of her hair here, which is a lot closer to what you would get in real life. I can maybe take it then just a little bit more. We can see clicking it on and off. It's just like, oh that's the color that it should naturally be. Now some things that we can do is enhanced different features in her face. To do this, we're using what I like to call a highlight and contour layer. This is my fancy way of saying dodging and burning and dodging being brightening areas and burning being darkening areas, now there is a Dodge and burn tool. There's different ways that you can do this I just use a brightening curves layer and then you can hit Command or Control, Delete on that. Then you can do a darken one. Again Command or Control Delete, and that inverts the layer, makes it black, and then you can just paint white where you want it to show up. We'll do highlight and we'll do contour. If any of you are familiar with makeup or anything like this at all. This is what people do on their face to enhance these features. Anyways, Van Eyck has a little bit of that highlight here that you can see reflecting that light, a bit of contour there as well. That's what we're going to play off of here. We're just going to enhance that a little bit, increase our brush size. Whenever you have the brush, you can just do a right-click and that will bring that up. Again, we're keeping a low flow here. I like about anywhere 5-10 percent. Just gently brushing that over, we can come up here to the temples as well. You want to go cheekbones, temples, jaw line, maybe the bridge of the nose, and maybe in the eyelid itself are the few areas that are naturally shadow points of the face. You can just increase. I'm going to put this on a little bit heavy and then I will bring it back momentarily. I just come in here, emphasize that a little bit there and the other eye as well. I don't want to forget that. We just bring it across the bridge of the nose. We can see that just adds a little more dimension there. I'll take that opacity down to less than 50 percent. We can see it still keeps it pretty light and natural, but it just enhances these features a little bit. Maybe bring that down a little more. Then we go in here with the highlight layer. Then the different things that we highlight here are the high points. The chin, the cheekbones, the upper jaw line, the lips, the bridge of the nose not the sides of it. You can do over the eyebrows, under the eyebrows, stuff like that to enhance those a little bit. I'm going to paint over here just gently come over to her lips. Paint that on just a little bit. Now you don't have to do this for your head shots. You don't have to come in and retouch quite like this. You don't have to emphasize these features. I'm going to add a little bit just to the irises here to make that pop a little bit. Something, if you have a keen eye, you will notice. Is that currently volcanic is wearing contacts. You can see them right here. That little line on her eye. Unless you zoom in like I just did, you won't really notice that. But when you're taking headshots of somebody, if they naturally wear glasses, it's best to get photos of them wearing glasses because that's how people know them. This is especially the case for businesspeople, for lawyers, doctors, for entrepreneurs, CEOs. If you wear glasses, it's best to have your photo with glasses on. This goes for creatives as well, unless you are an actor, dancer, a model, anything where you're being booked to portray another character of some kind to morph your being a bit. In that way you can have an option where you have your glasses on. But as a general thing, you usually want to have them off because they're not necessarily booking you because you wear glasses or not. It's better just to show your plane face because the chances are that character probably won't wear glasses. Keep that in mind. Generally, actors probably not. Anybody else, yeah. If they wear glasses, keep the glasses on. If you want to know how to avoid glasses reflections, it's actually remarkably easy. All you do, even if you have anti-glare lenses, like I do in these, all you have to do is make sure that the head isn't tilted up towards a light. If I have a light right here just out of frame, if I'm staring towards that, chances are I'm going to catch some of that reflection. Just pulls and face a little bit away from that light. This is where maybe the sidelight is a better lighting setup. Then if that doesn't quite work, bring the chin down a little bit, or just take those glasses and take them down the bridge of the nose just a little bit. Not so much that they're blocking the eyes, but not right up top, just a little bit so they will block that overhead light and then you won't get any reflections whatsoever. Then we're just going to come over here, get the brow bone. That's the bone where your eyebrow is just above your eye socket and then we can just round out her forehead a little bit. Blended in with that highlight there. I want to contour her hairline just a little bit here. I'll take that highlight down as well.. Just like that, we have a quite honestly fantastic headshot we can do. If you want to hold Alt or Option on the keyboard and click on your bottom layer. You can do a quick before and after and all that does is just enhance the face. Now, like I said, you don't have to do this. But if you want to judge, up to the head shot a little bit, or if you have a client that wants a little bit of that, then this is a way to do that as well. If you're looking for more intensive retouching, I have a couple of different portrait classes on here, mainly the photographing and posing models, I believe has an element of frequency separation in there, as well as different one light setups for portrait photos. I think both of those have some frequency separation tutorials in there. If you want to check those out, if you're looking for more intense skin retouching. But if you're just looking to keep it simple then this is really all you have to do and maybe I'll just come in here and brighten up that under eye just a little bit. Overall that's looking fantastic. Something else we can do that I'm just noticing as well. We can tidy up just a couple of these flyaway is now because this is a plain background, we can just hit B on the brush tool. Hit Alt or Option on the keyboard, click the background, get the same color, grab a larger sized brush, maybe add some higher flow to it, so it's just going to be a little more intense. Then we're just going to paint over loosely these little flyways just to straighten that out, make things look a little more seamless. Just like that, we have a fantastic headshot of the Van Eyck super big thanks to her for being in front of the camera and creating some great expression, some great photo and really helped to round out this class as a whole. Now that we've talked about how you can take your head shots from looking here to here let's actually talk about the real important thing, how to make money with them. 10. Final Thoughts: First and foremost, I want to thank you for making it to this point in the class. You've done it. You have all the tools to take a great headshot to go out there and start making bank with portrait photography and some super simple set-ups to keeping your back pocket to take better photos every single time. Headshots are something that I love as part of my business, you get to interact with people in a real and authentic way and capture them as who they are and who they want to be. Now you have the tools to do just that. If you enjoyed this class, make sure to follow along on my Skillshare profile as I'm always adding new classes regarding lighting, photography, cinema, and so much more. If you have any questions, make sure to pop down in the discussions down below as I'll be sure to answer them to the best of my abilities. Don't forget to submit your project of your one headshot from anybody in your life. Use natural light, use artificial light, use whatever you have to take a great headshot and remember those posing techniques. Also, if you're not tired of me talking by now and you want to hear more of it, you can go over to my YouTube and subscribe there where I'm sharing a bunch of different photography lifestyle and mindset videos as well. Now, with all of that out of the way, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart one more time and I hope this provides an immense amount of value to you. Thank you for spending your time with me today. Work hard, rest often. I hope you have any super creative day. 11. Bloopers: You ready for your moment? Oh, yes. Now? Yeah. [NOISE] Sometimes you have a cat in your studio. I've pretty much already framed her up here with where she's going to be standing [NOISE] for a 8 by 10 if you need to versus the other way around. [NOISE] [LAUGHTER] I'm going to sneeze. Well, I sneezed now. Perfect. [LAUGHTER]. [inaudible] keep doing this. No, it won't take long doing this, it will take long when I edit it. [LAUGHTER] The light in that scenario. Without further ado, we're going to jump over, get some light setup and I'll talk through the one to two main setups that I use for just about every head shot ever. Look. [LAUGHTER] Oh God, my work here is done. Great. [LAUGHTER] [inaudible] I'm a comedy genius. There we go. Face forward. My work here is done. I know. Let's see. Did I just completely screw myself. No, I didn't. Nice. Is it me [inaudible] You look like you're working on a ****. [LAUGHTER] Think Gilderoy Lockhart. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Just scooch over this way for me a little bit, just so you're in your light. You're now on the other side of the light. Back, split the difference. Yeah. Right there. Perfect. [OVERLAPPING]. [inaudible] Now you see a cute dog walk across the street. Dog. I want ice cream. [NOISE] It's like almost cinematic, but it looks like a bird. [LAUGHTER] The people at Skillshare don't have to know. Exactly. You don't have to know this. But they will be able to tell. No, they won't. [LAUGHTER]. Like we'd let them. [LAUGHTER] Anyways, I know you did because you know how to express and you're very expressive. You're very good at that. Everybody says that about me. I said it first, quite honestly. Sure. One photo? [NOISE] Nice. Now that we've gone through how to work with natural light, how to work with artificial light, you have multiple one light setups that you can pull out in a second to get a great head shot no matter where you are. It's because you didn't notice, but the all time you were talking it was growing. [OVERLAPPING] It made me shorter. [LAUGHTER] Well, I;m not the one making shenanigans now. Hi, cat. Two seconds later. You can hold it if you want. [LAUGHTER] What even is continuity?