Portrait Photography How To

The late Mr. Newton was certainly onto something. I believe the overwhelming desire of most portrait photographers is to please the client, with seduction, amusement, and entertainment far from their minds. Let me submit this idea: shoot what the client says they want and then shoot something challenging their assumptions. Most wedding clients tend to be traditional but even introducing black and white or infrared images can increase sales and show clients you’re thinking outside the veil.

I’ve been writing about and playing with—emphasis on play—Lensbaby lenses since they were introduced in 2004 and ten years later they’re still coming up with new ideas. All their products, including the Medium Format 3G with "Marvin the Martian"-like antennae, have been interesting and the new Lensbaby Velvet 56 portrait lens not only looks like fun but appears to be the most practical Lensbaby product ever.

Yesterday we brought you a timesaving tutorial for streamlining Lightroom so the workspace displays all the tools you use in the order you want, with everything else hidden from view. We have another great trick today, this time it's a simple hack for using the Histogram to achieve perfect White Balance.

Last week we featured a straightforward Lightroom tutorial explaining how to recover shadow detail in underexposed photos. Today we’ll help you solve the opposite challenge; namely, dealing with images that are far too bright.

Lightroom masks are very effective for quickly fixing photos that are improperly exposed, like when some areas in the scene are too dark or too bright, or perhaps even both when shooting in mixed light.

One way to really mess up an otherwise nice portrait is to get the lighting wrong and end up with shiny hot spots on a model’s face. But if you make that mistake, never fear, because one of our favorite image-editing experts comes to the rescue with a Lightroom quick fix below.

Whether you’re shooting formal portraits or quick photos of family and friends, imperfect skin can really detract from an image. In this tutorial you’ll learn the best way to smooth a subject’s skin in Lightroom.