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[OM] Re: Portrait PP, Objective, or Subjective

Subject: [OM] Re: Portrait PP, Objective, or Subjective
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:24:56 -0700
Garth Wood wrote:
> (As an aside, where's Moose on this one?)
>   
Question be may asking you good.

Moose virtually never gets sick. Even now, it's hard to say he's sick. 
But he's been feeling odd. and one clear symptom, whether of illness or 
who knows what, it a certain lack of interest in writing.

Looks like no Moose Monday this week. Somehow when he starts writing, 
attention wanders after a couple of sentences. He tried to do a simple 
little bit of programming, really simple, a few lines. Should have taken 
him five minutes max, written and tested. Must have been 20-30 minutes 
of stumbling around. Not sure just how long, 'cause his time sense has 
been a bit fuzzy too.

But always game, he took a look at the image in question and opined:

- Portraits are about intended use and expectations.  Seldom do those 
add up to a real effort at accurate reproduction.

- If you actually want color accuracy in uncharted light, which this 
was, get the subject to hold at least a gray card in one shot. Better 
would be a black/gray/white reference. An IT8 or Macbeath card would be 
even better, especially for film.

- Unless the subject is a banker, corporate attorney or some such, a 
promo shot should have some warmth, whether the person is warm colored 
in person or not.

- Once you abandon accuracy, it's all a matter of taste.

In this particular case, I suspect the Northern, winter light is very 
cool, and probably results in at least some under representation of warm 
skin color.

I'm with Chuck on this one. I dropped the warm, weird color hair shot in 
a layer on top of the original, lowered the opacity 'til I got a skin 
color that I liked (45%) - a white person in winter, but a living one.  
;-)   Then i made it a mask layer and painted out the hair area with a 
softish brush with low flow. 
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Whitmire/Esteemed.htm>

If this was shot RAW, playing with the color temp slider in the 
converter will do a better, subtler job of adjustment than the filter or 
whatever effect the Pbase person used.

If I were doing this, I would shoot a reference card even if I weren't 
interested in serious accuracy, just to have a reference for comparison 
to my adjustments so I would know how far I had gone.

Moose

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