Image Breakdown: What Makes a Portrait Work? With Canon Explorer of Light Sal Cincotta

Ready for an image breakdown? Let's get to it. What's up, everyone? My name is Sal Cincotta, Canon Explorer of Light, and today we're gonna do an image breakdown. So I'm gonna critique my own images. Not sure how I feel about that. So in a previous video, what we did was we were on a photo shoot and I wanted to show you how different lens types would impact a scene, let's say. So we went from a wide angle 28-70 to a 70-200 to an 85 millimeter, right? We got all the scenes you can imagine. Then we've got super compressed where we brought that background in using a 70-200, and then we did an 85 millimeter for more of a portrait lens. So what I wanna do right now is just actually dissect each of these images. Hindsight being 20-20, what could I have done better? What makes the image strong, what makes the image weak? And I think that's fair critique. I don't know a lot of photographers that are willing to do that kind of stuff to their own work because we think all our work is perfect, which it's not. All right, but let's do it. So we're gonna go into Photoshop and I'm gonna show you right here on the screen. I'm in Lightroom, show you three of these images. First image up, you can see I photographed 28-70. Next image is a 70-200, a little more compression. And then the final image was photographed at 85 millimeter, more of a portrait lens. And we photographed that wide open at F1.2, which is really how I like to photograph portraits. I know a lot of photographers out there, they love shooting at 5.6, 8.0 even at some point. It's just, it's not my style. You do you. I really like wide open. I like the softness of it. I like the bouquet. I like the way the fall off happens on the skin. It just gives them natural softening. So with that being said, let's open these up in Photoshop. All right, so first image up, it was the wider shot. We photographed this at 28-70. And you know, this is why focal length matters. The minute I go with a wide angle, I'm bringing in a lot of the environment that maybe that is distracting, right? So if we're really dissecting this and we look at what we did right, what we did wrong, what could be better, you can see just by lens choice, that's probably a bad decision. Because what's happening here is the entire right side of the image, you'll see this on your screen, is a complete distraction, right? I mean, it's just, it doesn't even match what's on the left side of the screen. Now, mind you, there's been no Photoshop to the image. Yeah, we did color correction, some beauty edits, but we didn't mess with the environment. So you could make the argument, you know, especially nowadays, that we can remove that in post. But from a lens choice perspective, the wide angle brought everything into play, okay? So what do we do right here? I'm really big on composition. So if you look here, you're seeing this natural stair step down into her shoulders, this natural V into her, right? And I think that there's a lot to be said there. That's really good composition. We're driving the eye visually into her. So that's what I did. If I moved a little bit more this way or a little bit more this way, that V wouldn't have driven to her. So we made the best of that particular situation. So that's something we did right from a compositional perspective. Now, what would I do if I were gonna spend some time? If we say, what could have been done better? Honestly, it's a location choice, right? This is what we were dealing with here. The only choice is a different lens, and I did make that choice, right? So I'm okay with that. What could we fix? If I were to spend some time in Photoshop, what could we fix? Now, I know there's gonna be some purists out there who are just like, you know, no, Photoshop, eh. But that, it's not worth here to debate, right? You can use Photoshop to clean some of this stuff up, and it's okay. So we're using the remove tool, and it's just, it's super intelligent with what it's gonna do. Just removing this stuff from the side, you're seeing it. This is cleaning up the image because those poles are a little bit distracting. So these are some things we could do really quick and easy. You know, just get rid of some of this stuff that's distracting, and make the image a little bit stronger, right? So again, it's not a Photoshop class, but you're seeing just how those little details, right, just I turn that on and off, just making life a whole lot easier. If I really wanted to take this further, which I don't, because this is the environment we were at, I could flip the buildings right to the other side. It's just, it's not what I wanna do. I think this looks good. Easy cleanup. Let's move on to the next image. Now here, to me, this is a little bit of a stronger image, right? So now we used a 7200 for this. We've got really good compression, really good composition, and she's popping off that background, right? So we don't have, by shooting this at F2.8, we don't have a whole lot of distractions in the image. So this entire background, look how soft it is, right? So you've gotta realize that depth of field creates separation. So not only are we getting separation from the compression using a 7200 lens, we're getting separation from depth of field, right? That background is going super blurry. She is tack sharp, so she's popping off that. You can do this with colors, right? We can create separation with colors. We can create separation with lighting and exposure, right? If somebody's bright in the foreground, dark in the background, they're gonna pop off. So this, to me, is something we really did good. I feel like this is a strong image. Now we start looking at, you know, what could have been done better. To me, this is very subjective composition. If you notice where I'm cutting her off, right? It's right here. And the way I've got her posed, I didn't really wanna see her lower body. I do this a lot. I do this with my brides. I really do like photographing this. So I'll take the full body portrait, no doubt, but sometimes I like to just crop, like just at the thigh or just below the knee, right in that range, and then just have your subject kind of like frame that up. And you could even change composition here, meaning I could have shot this a little wider, but put her in the bottom right frame and had a little bit more headroom up top, right? I'll kind of give you a sense of what I'm talking about. So if we were to raise this up here and go here, let's see what this will do for us. So you get a sense of what I'm doing now. You know, this kind of gets a little bit wonky. I mean, the generative fill is just incredible, but this would be the kind of composition that I think would look super cool because it kind of expands that image. Now we'd have to go back in here. You're already seeing it. Do some dodge and burn work because the brightness around her is starting to look a little fake just because of the way this expanded. But I do like this compositionally. And then we can do things where we might want to straighten this a little bit. And at this point, all you're doing is really like polishing an image to get it to look the way you want, right? So I do like the way this looks. Like I said, I'd probably do some dodging and burning here. But also one other thing I would do here, you've got to be conscious of what you're doing with your subject, right? So because of the way I had her pose in this, right? I have her hip jutted out. I'm making her look heavy and taking away her natural curve. She's actually has curves. So I would fix this. If I'm working on this for a client, I would come in here and just give her waist just a little push here to offset what I screwed up from my posing. Now you've got to be careful with stuff like this. And this is, look, you may be watching this and going, I would never do, God bless, don't do it. Do what's right for you, your customers, your business. But if I'm making the mistake because of the way I'm posing somebody, I want to fix that. That's a me thing. Like right here in this left-hand corner where you're seeing my mouse, that's fabric. So I want to push that in. There's no reason for that to be jutting out like that, right? So these are the kinds of things, and you got to do it right, right? Because if I start getting heavy handed with this, right? Which we've all seen those Instagram influencers that don't look that way in real life. If I start getting heavy handed with this, this just looks ridiculous, right? So it's one of those things where less is more, season to taste, I always like to say, right? So that's how I adjust this image and go from there. It looks pretty good, honestly. Now we came into the 85. Now you're seeing really big fall off with the buildings behind her. I do like the way the sun came out at the latter part of the shoot. I like her pose. I like the crop again. So this to me is a strong image. I like this image for her. Again, we're on a parking garage, but there's things we can do a little bit better here, right? So it is driving me nuts that I've got this railing, if you will, just cutting her across at the waist. It's not my favorite, right? Maybe you go, well, that's a poor location choice, but we're on top of a parking garage. But one trick that we use as photographers is to close your eyes. I went to judging school with PPA, right? And so one of the things they teach us as image competition judges is, you know, just how to dissect an image. And one trick I learned that is still holds true to this day is close your eyes and open them. Where does your eye go? We'll always go to the brightest part of the image. You've got to think through where you want your viewer to go. And so what I find is in the bottom left-hand corner of this image, I don't know if you saw it, but there's one of those just like, you know, it's like a little plastic hub that's on the wall. Massively distracting, right? Because your eye is working through the image and that is white in the image. It's just pulling me away from the rest of the shot. So I'll show you this and we'll use the remove tool. And just by getting rid of that, it just makes the image, you know, stronger. So we'll get rid of that and that will become less of a distraction. And then you can do some dodging and burning and things like that, right? Hair is driving me a little bit nuts. And again, I'm being hypercritical here because, oh, that's the point of this video, right? Like, so I always say to myself, when I'm working as an artist, the way I've gotten better over the last 20 years of my career is I always look at an image and I ask myself what could be better, right? Yeah, I've taken some amazing images around the world, great images, but I still am very critical and I look at those and I go, well, how could I make it better? Not because I want to self-deprecate myself. It's just more so I can look to the future and go, I want to be better tomorrow than I was today. I want to be better next month than I was last year. That's my mindset. So hopefully that helps you here. But, you know, what I want to do now is I want to print one of these. I want to bring these to print because I think that's so important when you're working on this. So let's bring this image. I think this one's going to print the best that's on the screen right now. But what I want to do is get the dodging and burning a little bit stronger. So we're going to add a new layer and then what we're going to do is select subject. So this will give us a mask if it selects her correctly and then we'll use that mask. All right, so it selected her. And then what we're going to do is create a mask of her. And then I'm going to select that mask, hit Command I. That inverts the mask to make sure everything but her is selected, which is what I want. I want the background. I'm then going to add a curves layer. And what I want to do is just bring down the background just a little bit, right? And what's happening, you saw that background get a little bit darker, create a little more separation, but I still have some way too hot around her, right? So what I'm going to do is we're going to create a new layer, Command Alt Shift E, and I'm going to add a curves layer to this. And I'm going to show you what I'm going to do here. We're going to select that mask and hit Command I, which blacks everything out so we don't see it. Okay, and I'm going to show you why in a second. So I'm going to pull this curves layer down and you can see I'm pulling it all the way down. It's not doing anything to the image. I'm going to select my brush tool, select white, and then feather this a little bit. And I'm just going to paint in some of this stuff around her so that haloing isn't as noticeable. It's a very soft brush. And once I do this, let's just say I feel like it's too, it's too dark, right? What I can do here is come here on this curves layer because it's a separate layer and just, now I don't have to be, right? I can go like this and that looks ridiculous, or I can just really soften this subtly, right? And you could see that difference there. The other thing I can do here is feather this mask and that'll blend it a little bit better, okay? So if we do on and off, you can see now that's blended that a little bit better. And then if I want to come back in and maybe brush it in a couple other places and we can get this evened out a little bit more, just don't want it to be overly noticeable. I mean, it's already there. And if I want to blend it even more, just feather it more. Now that's starting to look a little bit better. And if you get it in places it's not supposed to be, just change the color. We don't want it on her. You can see I got some on her. So we're just going to brush that off. Make sure it's not on her face, all right? So now I like this image. I'm going to save it. This is going to be the one we print. I'm going to print this and I'm going to print this. Let's see what it looks like on paper. I want to bring my images to life. So what we're going to do right now is we are going to print this image. So let's go into Lightroom and we're going to use the Canon software here. So we're going to plug in extras, Canon Professional Print Layout. And now we are in the print tool. So what we're going to do is we are going to start messing with the setup here. And we are going to print this on 13 by 19 semi-gloss paper. I think for the type of images they are, semi-gloss is going to look really good. Okay, so we'll go in. We'll start selecting media type. We've got photo papers. This is the photo paper plus semi-gloss. I want to select the size. It is 13 by 19. Okay, and we can go edge to edge if we want, but we'll just do, for this purpose, we'll print it, I think like eight by 12s here. Print quality, let's go with the highest. Take a little longer to print, but it's going to look good. Alignment, we'll go with center. I'm going to use an ICC profile. We'll tell the printer, we want to tell it what paper we're using again. Photo paper plus semi-gloss. Okay, this is making sure all the colors match what we're seeing on our calibrated monitors. Okay, and now we will hit print. We're telling it one copy. Let's hit print, and it's off to the printer. It's that easy. The favorite part for me is, honestly, just knowing what I saw during the shoot, coming back, editing that, fine-tuning that image, and then sending it to print. That's the most exciting part. ♪ Can't hold me, can't hold me, can't hold me, can't hold me ♪ ♪ Hustle like I'm Ben Crosby ♪ All right, well, these look absolutely stunning. My opinion, they actually look better in print than they do on a computer screen. I think that's kind of the point. We've gotten used to looking at things on a screen so much, we just got to put stuff on our walls. We got to really bring this to life, and this seals the deal for me. So, hopefully, in this episode, you enjoyed kind of a breakdown, even though I kind of ripped on some of my own images, but we can always get better as artists, can't we? And hopefully, this encourages you to print your images and bring them to life, so get them off your hard drives and get them on your walls. We'll see you in the next video.