After Larry Patrick's spectacular Body of Work presentation to our photo club a couple of weeks ago I went through my folder of portraits from that trip. I have a long way to go to shoot portraits that are close to his level of expertise, but by following his teachings I got a few that were an improvement for me. This gypsy was very interesting to watch because she had a very expressive face and movements. My raw file of this image was dark with blown highlights on her fingers, part of the violin and the crown of her head from direct sun that was coming from behind her on the right. I tried various things in Photoshop and this is my final version.Camera info: Nikon D200, 70 - 200 mm f2.8 lens at f2.8 and 1/1000th, ISO 200, cloudy whitebalance.
Post processing: cloned out blurry accordian player from the background and used the clone tool and a soft brush in skin color to fix the highlights on her fingers, levels adjustment layer to tone down the scarf on the crown of her head and used other parts of her scarf to replace areas, levels adjustment to brighten her face, merged layers and changed blending mode to softlight at 25%, levels for global brightness, darkened background by using a brush in softlight mode on a new layer to paint a vignette, sharpened with the highpass filter in overlay mode.
