Before & After | Correcting an Underexposed Portrait

Here’s another before and after with Karen from a shoot we did in November last year. I just had to post this!! The SOOC image is straight up ugly. And that has nothing to do with the subject, mind you. It’s simply a bad image that is underexposed and too cool. I mean come on, images from the 35 1.4L should NOT look this bad! When I checked out the exif data, I could see that this was shot at f4. Not a particularly narrow aperture, but in my opinion, **too narrow for a head shot. Yikes! This is kinda the opposite of what I wrote about in my recent post about shooting wide open. I’m not sure why I was thinking f4 would be good for this photo, but chances are I just wasn’t thinking. Next time, definitely 1.4.

You will see that the color corrected image in Lightroom is a great improvement over the original but it’s still a little bit cool and just a tad dull. My trusty Photoshop actions spruced this right up.

In order from first to last, they are:
Clarify at 5% – Eye Candy Actions
Clarify (again) at 30% on everything but the subject – Eye Candy Actions
Carnivale Color at 10% – Eye Candy Actions
Pool Party at 20% – TRA Actions
Claire-ify at 25% – TRA Actions
A hue adjustment layer to correct the green shirt, Cyan at -6

**This is just my opinion. I typically like to shoot portraits both close up and full body at f1.4 to f2.8. This makes for a beautiful, creamy skin tone and texture.