two girl portraits, color & mono / #club100

jpegg (65)Team 250SP 🐟in WORLD OF XPILAR • last year (edited)

I was pretty busy for the last week, and had no extra time to do blogging, but today is Sunday, finally a lazy day for me to breath out, and of course I am back to my blog. I am really excited of event, that happened recently, and wanna boast with some cool portrait shots I've made. See, I rarely have an opportunity to shoot portraits (not speaking about some paparazzi-style street photos of strangers at the streets, the genre I pretty much enjoy, but still: they do not pose and you cant experiment with staging, lighting etc).

So, a while ago I had a call from one my acquaintance who remembered that I own a PRO camera and can take pics - they needed some promotional pictures for their production (their office is doing sales for a variety of nonfic literature), so I was booked to run a big photosession with editor girls and their chief. What I can say: it was a pretty much new experience to me, I think I learned something new, and of course I had fun, and a load of photos to process.

All in all, I took 290 photos, apparently 1/4 of it was selected as suitable and client requested them as finished/polished hires versions. Now I have an extensive training in artsy portrait retouching and .raw processing into fine-looking attractive jpegs. I definitely will have something on my hands to join the future #Portrait contest rounds, and #Photo-Processing contest as well.

Original capture looked like this camera's .raw file, I just downscaled it for preview purposes. No extra lighting was used, except the common office tungsten lamps. The background was neutral grey walls ... perhaps that may look not so fancy but it provided some focus on the models.

The final colour-corrected version. What was done here: I applied an overall contrast boost; saturated colors by 25%; moved the overall color impression from cold-blue to warmer-red; pulled out some details from the shadows area (her dress now has the texture, hairs became more contrast and detailed); removed the blue-ish tint from the eyes area and raised contrast too; and of course adjusted the skin-tones and retouched the problem zones. Would greatly appreciate any critic and advises of the PRO fellows.

And the monochrome version. I cant choose 100% but monochrome clicks me a bit more. What will be your opinion on this pair?

Post goes for week 136 of WoX Portrait and Art contest run by @axeman

And the last one, as a bonus - our little exercise in the traditional "book with love" or "love to reading" genre... totally staged - the temptation to perform this was absolutely impossible to resist!