HIGH KEY IMAGES ~ Research

Thinking about my chosen theme of studio portraiture, I have been looking at some contemporary work and find that high key seems to be very popular.

I decided to convert an image I already had to high key to see if this is how I would like my final images to look.

The following shot has been converted to high key in photoshop CS5.

This shot was taken in a beach cafe in Spain this September as a raw file and converted using b&w adjustment tool in CS5.

On opening the raw file I used the 'fill light' slider to brighten their faces since it was shot into the sun, cutting out some light, they also had quite a dark suntan.  

This screen shot above shows the raw file opened in CS5 for further processing.  I first cloned out grains of sand from his face then decided where to crop, keeping the main subject's eyes as near to the top third as possible to balance the image.

After cropping I used b&w adjustment tool to convert the image and tried out the presets to see if any gave the look I was after.

I wanted to lighten their faces a little more so I used the Curves tool then inverted the mask by using ctrl and i taking a soft brush to paint with white and brighten their faces, smoothing out the brush strokes by going into 'masks' panel to increase the feather.

I used colour balance adjustment to add a little warmth since I seemed to have a blue tint. I then decided to add a vignette to concentrate the gaze on their faces rather than around the edge and used  the layers pallete, changing the blending mode to 'divide' giving a light vignette rather than dark.

After adding a border using 'canvas size' and changing the colour to grey I added a drop shadow to get the picture to stand our from the page.

Lastly, I ran my watermark action which I created some time ago for use on Flickr.

I think it turned out pretty well but I am still not convinced that this is the type of finish I am looking for.