Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tabitha. And in this photography class, I'm going to show you how
to take your own headshots. Having a good quality headshot is a great way to establish authority with your brand and connect to your customers by showing them what you look like. Updating your headshot photo is going to be something
that you will have to tackle at some point. And so I'm going to
show you how to do it simply at home
all by yourself. You are going to
need a camera and a tripod at the bare minimum. I also recommend having
an infrared remote, which will tell your camera
when to take the picture, as well as a laptop
to tether with so that you can be in
the zone taking good pictures and looking at your screen and making
sure that they are in focus and that they are properly exposed, and that
they look good. And there's no weird things
that you need to fix in the background that
you wished you would have seen when
you were working. So come along with
me as I update my own headshots
and I will take you through the entire process
from getting set up, picking a good place to
take the picture and editing to Pfition
my name is Tabitha. I am a lifestyle product and food photographer and a top
teacher here on Skill Share. I'm really excited to share
everything that I know about this subject and to stand here looking cute in
front of the camera for you. Um, let's get started.
2. Lighting and Gear: Alright. So I have
you on my iPhone. I have me on my iPhone. And this is one of my
favorite tricks to do to figure out where is
gonna be the best light. I can see myself, and I'm gonna walk around to different parts of my
house that I thought, Oh, that might be nice and tell you why they would or would not. So this particular spot, it's getting partial direct
sun and partial shade. I like the plant here. So if I could find
a way to frame myself to include the
plant, that might be nice. I'm getting a
strong highlight on this side of my face because
I'm next to a window. And so having a nice
highlight side and a shadow side defines your
face in a really pleasant way. So that could work, especially if the sun
goes behind a cloud, but it's too hard to plan around the sun going behind a cloud. And so I'm going to show you
a couple different places upstairs that I think
will work better for us. Here in the hallway, I have a lot of plain
white backgrounds. This can be really
tempting because it's a very clean spot behind you. This would provide a nice, even background, but
it is kind of boring. And you can see my face is
kind of in the shadows here. If I turn around and shoot
against this other wall, you can see my face is lit
up, but not in a good way. Look at the floor, how the
light hits that patch of carpet and bounces up into
this underside of my face. So we're getting
under my cheeks. We're getting under my lips. There's a shadow right here, like, this is not a pleasant. This is not a pleasant way to light yourself from underneath. It looks very like
ghost story spooky. So we're gonna we're
not gonna shoot there. Again, I might not have noticed that if I hadn't
walked around with my phone to figure
out where to shoot. This is obviously a bad choice, your backlet and it makes my hair all
sprimbly right there. However, this spot, oh, you can see I'm glistening. I'm shining. It's beautiful. This spot I really like. This is where I usually film my intros right here because
it's like, aesthetic. What is nice about
this yellow curtain is it contrasts the purple
of my hair really fun, and it looks really nice. So in this spot, I have one of my curtains drawn. If I had the curtain open, it would shine
direct light on me. Well, actually, it's throwing
direct light behind me, and it puts me in
the shadow because it wants to light the
background up brighter. So, and then there we go. As the sun comes out, it'll hit me in the cheek and
not be very pleasant. So I closed it so
that to my side, it is not hitting me directly. The light is coming in
from a 45 degree angle, and I think I can
get a pleasant look. This spot is a little
bit dimensional. It's got some stuff going on in the background for
some interest. I'm going to see if I can
get a good framing here. Also, look at my eyes. They like, light
up really pretty. I will have to avoid
glare looking at my glasses in the screen. So I'm gonna set up
here in this spot, and we can move
to the next step. Okay, so this is my video
camera that I film with. It's the Sony A seven S
three, and I love it. It has a fully
articulating screen, so I can flip the screen out, stand where I want to stand and know if I'm
actually in the frame. This is amazing. However, this is the camera
that I will be filming with. And so I'm gonna need to see myself
while I'm being filmed. And so if you have
the option for a fully articulating screen,
that's always my bet. I go too. I highly recommend it. It makes a huge difference. The other camera that I
have is the Sony A seven R, three, and it does not have the fully
articulating screen. So I will show you
what to do if you want to be able to see yourself while you're trying
to take pictures. Alright. So in
order to be able to see what you look like
while you are shooting, we are going to be
connecting our camera to a laptop using the cable
that came with it, which is probably one of these. I'm hoping it's this one. Tell you what,
it's not this one. It's Oh, it is this
one. Plug that in. Plug this in, plug this in. Alright. So in order to set up tethering here in light room. We're gonna hit File. Tethered capture and then
hit start tethered capture. So it's gonna detect my camera. It says, Make sure your
camera is turned on. It is now. Detecting
with the scrolly guy. Lightroom Classic is
unable to connect. It does not support tethering. No A 73, a seven R four.
The plot has thickened. I have to swap cameras, so my A seven S three will be the one
that takes my picture, and the A seven R three
will be the one that films because that's what it
takes. See you in a second.
3. Photograph Yourself: Alright. I'm currently set up. So this camera is recording. This cameras taking my picture. My laptop is hooked up. I have light room pulled up. I have plugged in. These two
are talking to each other. So now, when I take a
picture on my camera, it's in self timer mode. So when it takes
a picture there, it automatically
pops it up to here. Look, she looks like she
knows what she's doing. So, this is going to sit over
here where I can see it, and I will make sure that I'm in focus and that
I am captured well. So now, since I had
to switch cameras, I do actually, in fact, have
a mirror, which is great. I'm assuming I'm in
the frame on this one because it doesn't Wow. Alright, so we want to make
sure our hair's looking good. When you look in the camera, you want to look in
the actual lens, not where the screen would
be, if that makes sense. So don't stare at yourself on the screen. Look
at the camera. I have a little remote. I highly recommend
this. It's gonna make your life so much easier. There's an infrared
guy on the front of this camera that this talks to. And also, I don't want this
situation in my portrait. So we're gonna we're gonna just hope that
it's not too much, 'cause you want to be
able to hear me, right? I'm doing my best. Okay, my settings are 1/160,
which is a little bit slow. Let's actually just kick that up now because I know
I'm gonna move. I'm gonna want 1/250. I'm shooting at F 2.8, which will blur my
background in a nice way. And then my ISO is set to 200, but since I just made my
shutter speed faster, I'm going to click
that up to 320. We have clouds today, so they're going to
be rolling in and out in a really fun way. It's going to make our
job a little harder. I'm going to do kind of like
a putting my shoulder toward the camera to just so that
I'm not square to the camera. I feel like this is slightly more flattering. I don't know. I hate that word. When I
hit the shutter button, it'll count down with a beep, and then it'll take my picture. So I'm going to
stand right where the focus square is and hope that it focuses
on me, there you go. Cute. Okay, so took the picture. Now it'll pull it
up on my computer. We got it. We nailed it. Alright, we're all
done. Just kidding. I mean, it's a good picture, but you should definitely
take a lot and change it up, change up your hair, hold
the cat for a couple. We want to add some personality. We took a long time to
set up. We may as well take advantage of
it. So back too. Remember, it's so tempting to look at your face if
you have the screen, but look into the lens,
look into the lens. And we can experiment
with getting closer. I feel like I'm hunching over. Typically, you want your camera to be a little bit
higher than you. It's just easier to feel like you're getting
a more flattering angle. And also, I'm looking
at my computer, and I feel like my skin
is really blown out. So let's drop our ISO to compensate for how bright
it got all of a sudden. So I'm at 1160 looks
a little bit dark. I'm at 200. A, shake it up. You are alone in your house, taking pictures of yourself. No one is judging you, okay? Not even yourself.
We're professionals. It can help to laugh, even
though it feels stupid. I'm having a great time. This is also a really good time to take one of those like, Hey, I'm getting a lot
of new followers here, and I just wanted to
introduce myself. So maybe you are
sitting or you have a book or you hold a camera. I sure wish I had one to hold. They're all working right now. I can hold my phone.
Does that feel cool? I don't know that I care
that much about being cool. I'm just going to tick
through some of these, make sure that I got a
picture that is cute. I'm gonna do some with
my hair behind my ears. So I look smart. Alright, now that we
have our pictures, I'm gonna show you a few tiny
little tweaks along with some general editing
that's going to make your photos stand
out. See you there.
4. Lightroom Edit and Retouch: Alright. Welcome to
the editing portion. The cool thing about
tethering into Lightroom is that it imports your photos
while you're shooting. So I didn't have to
stick your card in. My photos were already
here, which is awesome. So I've gone through and added a one star to every photo
that I think has potential, and we are going to start
with this first one. What I like about it is the
exposure is really even. This histogram has a lot
of peaks in the center. They're not, you know, way too high over on the
right hand side, and they're not way too low
over on the left hand side. So that's how I know
that my image is very evenly exposed, very balanced. My skin tone is not blown
out, which is great. And I'm in focus. Hora. So I'm going to
start with the crop because I know this photo is going to end up on Instagram, and so I'm going to
crop to eight by ten, four by five just arbitrarily. I like to crop to put my eyes
on one of the third lines. The top third line makes the most sense in this case.
So we're going to do that. And then my picture is
a little bit crooked, so I'm just going to adjust
it so it's nice and straight. Now that we have a nice crop, let's go ahead and
balance the image. I usually start
with my exposure, so I'll bring that up
or down, depending. I'm going to leave
mine where it's at because I feel like
the exposure is good, but I do want to bring more information into
the shadow areas. So I'm going to bring
my shadow slider up. This will only
brighten up my hair, the shadows in my neck and
my skin, and the background. Next, I want to take my
highlights slider down. This is going to soften those
bright spots on my face. Next, I'm going
to scroll down to the tone curve drawer and
do a very similar edit. I'm going to bring
the darks slider up. That's going to bring
light into the dark areas, and I'm going to bring
the shadow slider down to bring back the contrast that we lost from doing
that first one. Next up, I want to address
the color temperature. So I always have my cameras
set to auto white balance. I like looking for a neutral or white spot in the image that I can
use my color picker. So I grab this color picker next to the temperature sliders. So make sure that
when you're picking, you are picking
something gray or white. So my walls are gray, but they're a little
bit greenish. So it made me look magenta. Let's try the white edge
of my picture frame. Still kind of magenta. Let's try my T
shirt. Okay, closer. So the T shirt is neutral enough that it did add some
warm tones to the photo. I can decide clicking
back and forth. Do I like the warmth or
do I want less of it? I feel like where we want to end up is somewhere
right in between. So we're going to just bring back the warmth
just a little bit. I want my skin
tone to look good. Oftentimes, pulling
the slider toward the pinks ends up at
least for my skin, making it look more normal. So I'm bringing that
up just a little bit. So I should be seeing
some pinks in my skin, and then the warm
tones balancing. Something that I want to
address next is textures. So let's zoom into my skin. You can see, so I'm at 100. I don't want to go into
200, but we'll do it. Here at 200, you can
see my skin texture, and I'm sure this is bugging you as much as it's bugging me. I had a chia smoothie
and that's in there. Let me show you how
to remove that. We are going to go to
this little eraser tool. We're gonna set it to completely remove that. So we
have the remove. We have a band aid,
which is heal, and then we have a clone stamp, which will do an exact copy. So the little eraser guy
uses AI to erase it. So we're going to adjust our brush size to be just
big enough to cover that. I'm going to click on it, and it analyzes the photo and uses AI to get that out of there
to clean up my teeth. And that looks amazing. So just to remind you, here is what it looks like
with food in my teeth, and here is with it gone. My teeth aren't
like crazy white. So I would probably
just leave them as is. But if you wanted to edit your teeth to make them
a little bit whiter, what you're gonna want
to do is go to the mask. You're going to want
to grab your brush. Sometimes Light room has
presets already for this. So if you click on
the preset custom, and then I think okay, looks like it's probably
not currently in there. I created my own
teeth whitening, which it bumps the
exposure, 0.4, and it decreases
the saturation -60. And so, taking my brush and just painting
my teeth with it, you can see the
difference between this tooth and this tooth and
how that teeth whitening. Works. And so I would do
this if somebody was like, Hey, can you whiten
my teeth or whatever? Like, Sure, I'll go in
and draw on the teeth. It desaturates. I brightens. And then something
else that you can do. If it looks fake, if it doesn't look it
looks too intense. It's on too much, you can
adjust the amount of whitening, so you could be like,
Oh, more whitening, or you can pull that
down and do less, and it will automatically
take the sliders down just a little bit so
that it's more subtle. So, for example,
we're gonna zoom out. I like to look at the picture as a whole and decide, you know, Are people going to look at
this picture and think, Wow, her teeth look like they've been enhanced or is it going to
be a little bit more subtle? Next up, I personally
love my crow's feet. I think they look so cute. But if you didn't like
yours and you wanted to erase them or if someone
specifically asked you to, we are going to do a preset
called I'm going to do softened skin one
should be preloaded. I don't feel like I
invented that one, but the softened skin
preset has it set to take the clarity down 100%. And I think it also
adds sharpness 25. We're gonna hit Create New
mask and go to the brush. It is set to soften skin preset. And I'm going to
increase the size of my brush using
the right bracket. And then I will just
paint in these kind of, like, wrinkly areas and
we will soften them out. We will soften this
shadow where my smile is. We will soften my forehead. I think we got all the spots, but this is intense. So again, we are going to take
the amount down to, like, just the bare minimum, just enough to just take
the edge off without, like, completely
smearing my skin. And so you can see here
is before, here's after. It's subtle, but it's there compared to
when I first applied, which, like, smeared
out my skin. So yeah, I feel like we're
in a good spot here. If you wanted to
brighten your eyes, iris enhance is
usually too intense, but we'll use it and then turn it down just
like we did before. So I would just
color in my iris. I think it adds sharpening. It brings the exposure
up a little bit and the saturation. Oh,
yeah, and the clarity. It doesn't bring
the sharpness up. I'm gonna bring the sharpness up 'cause I like having
a nice sharp eye. I'm going to bring the
exposure back down just a little just so it
looks more realistic. I want my eyes to stand out, but I don't want
them scary or fake. So I feel pretty
good about that. Let's see the
difference between this is without and
then this is with. So it's just a little
bit of contrast, just a little bit of
sharpness added there. So I have this green
glare in my glasses, and I want that to go away. So I'm going to hit
Create New mask. I'm going to go to a brush, and then let's try
to paint that in using a color like a pink. So I'm going to
increase the tint, and I'm going to draw in that green spot to see if
I can sort of tone it out. So I'm using the opposite color. I'm gonna warm it up. That's better. And then
increase the tint. A little more. It's better than
it was. So you can see how green that
glare looks right here. And then when I flick
my color adjustment, it's a lot less noticeable. Okay, cool. So I feel really happy
with this picture. Let's increase the sharpening. We're gonna bring that
sharpening slider up, and then we're gonna hold down the option
key while we mask. This is terrifying, I know, but it just masks the edges. We're going to do just a
touch of noisy reduction. That will soften
the pixels just a little bit so that
it's not too crunchy. Oh, we're actually
pretty crunchy. I'm going to take my
sharpening down just a little, so it's not that crunchy. And I feel really
good. So let me show you what the before
and after looks like. It's very subtle.
You can see there's a lot more green tones in
my skin in the before, and I toned that out by
increasing the tint. You can see that
it's cooler toned. I made it warmer tone. I imagine the camera
probably wanted to make it cool because that
curan is yellow, and so the camera tries
to balance it for you. And then you can see that
there is more light in, like, my eyes and yeah, just in general, more contrast. And nothing in my teeth. Thank goodness. Okay. So now that we have an
edit that we like, let's go ahead and hit Copy. And we can paste it
onto the next shot. Hey, it's mean Solly. Oh, and look, I did the
thing I told you not to do. I was looking at the screen
right above my camera. So my eyes are not
looking at the camera. Neither are hers. So I guess it works, but
that's pretty cute. I'll probably use that picture anyway because it's
kind of adorable, and I'm gonna tone out that
color a little bit better. Maybe I should cut my hair. It's kind of cute that length. Anyway. So yeah, there was
a couple other photos. Let's see. This one.
Oh, yeah. Okay. So this one my
highlights got really, really bright in my
skin right here. So I wanted to see if I
could bring those back. So if you bring the
highlight slider down, see how it brings information back into
those bright spots, and then you would want to increase the shadows to kind
of balance it out that way. We're going to increase
the exposure overall, add a little bit more
pink, and then awesome. Here are my finished headshots. I took a few different options. I really like this one.
The cat one's cute. This one's kind of
fun and playful, little bit of an action shot. So yeah, hopefully this was helpful to see
my editing process, things I'm thinking when
I am working with colors, and how to do some additional
retouching if desired. Thank you for watching.
5. Final Thoughts: And that's everything. Thank you so much
for taking my class. I hope that you
enjoyed it, and I hope that you feel empowered to set up some cameras and take some new
headshots of your own. I hope that I was able
to offer a lot of helpful insights and
demystify having to tackle this seemingly daunting project and give you a roadmap to
best success on your own. If you do take a headshot, I would love to see it in
the class project section. If you want feedback,
let me know. And I would be happy
to provide that, give you some tips and
tricks and pointers to uh, hone in your work. So don't forget to share
here on Skill Share. And if you share on
Instagram, please tag me. My handle is Tabitha Park, and I always love to see what you are creating
over in that space, too. So yeah, if you enjoy this
class and you want more, I have over 36 classes here
on Skill Share from making your own backdrop to
photographing chocolate and coffee and
doughnuts and cats, and just anything that sounds fun to photograph
that'll help teach a concept. I kind of my whole stick, so you have anything
specific you'd like to see me teach, feel free
to drop me a line. I always love to hear
what you want to watch. And until next time,
thanks for watching.
Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer
