Customer Reviews

Corrective Lighting, Posing & Retouching for Digital Portrait Photographers

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very good book. It is advice aimed at say the town photographer who is taking senior portraits. Its aimed at photographer who are running a business and are a tight deadline where time is money. You won't find any super fancy photoshop techinques in here- instead you will find techniques that quickly let you produce a marketable print to your customers. He also spend a good deal of time on how to cover up problems when your taking the photo, rather then trying to cover them up in photoshop later. While I may not agree with everything in the book I think it a good primer on how a business side studio would have to run, as opposed to a more artistic based studio, where you could perhaps work at a more relaxed pace.

Great book not so much on lighting as it is on positioning your subjects so when you do snap the shutter they are posied to look their best. This can be hard for folks overweight, this book explains how you can position just about anyone to make their photos look better and they will feel better about it.

This book is wonderfully written. It answered most of my questions and some I had not thought of. I would recommend this book to anyone having trouble getting that perfect shot.

A great book for beginners, but OK for more seasoned photographers. The author explains 'some' (this is a key word here, as he only demonstrates a few techniques to help some problems) posing techniques to hide certain flaws or less than desirable features in the subjects. Beware though, he does not teach you a lot or more than a few tricks, you will have to build your own knowledge from several sources. The author does however, point out that fashion magazines are a great source for poses.

In terms of digital retouching, the book only discusses a couple of tools and only shows how to do a very limited number of things in detail. Like whitening teeth, smoothing skin, and adding blur. The book only briefly discusses how to use the liquefy tool to correct overweight issues and the like. Not the amount of detail I was hoping for.

The author does tend to speak a lot from personal experience, he talks a lot about how he runs his business, how he likes to do things, how he..... and so on, so forth! This can be a bit annoying. The reader is looking for more of an objective view on the subject. Books by Mr. Bill Hurter tend to do a better job at that and explain posing much better.

One thing that really annoyed was certain terms he used throughout the book, terms like "seniors" referring to senior high school students, at first I thought the author was talking about senior citizens but the pictures in the book were mostly of teenagers, I kept thinking 'what on earth is the man going on about!?' I then remembered that the book is American!

The book seems like it was written in a hurry, not that it lacks cohesion, but it's full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Its worse when you consider that this is a second edition, which means that it was reprinted for a second time and no one bothered to recheck it.

All in all, the book does offer good advice on posing and retouching techniques, but don't expect it to be the ultimate guide to posing nor retouching. I would say that is worth the moeny spent and worth reading more than once, but it seems to me that this is more targeted towards photographers who run their private studios.

Information in here will help you hide the flaws that make people not buy your portraits! Get it... learn it by heart and use it to drive up your sales even on tough-lower-self-esteem-having clients. By all means a must own!

Fantastic for those of us who are just starting out in this craft, the author covers photography for those of us who don't have access to supermodels.

A great discussion on how to use lights and posing to hide flaws and enhance features to create portraits that people will enjoy and buy. This book also contains some basic retouching techniques for the final photo.

While I don't agree with the business perspective of the author, that does not mean I did not like reading this book. It contains a ton of useful pointers and advice that even if you don't agree with it, it will make you think about your own approach and that's always a good thing. The author does not like using photoshop so do not expect a ton of photoshop tutorials. Aside from that it is a book that every professional photographer would benefit to read.

I am really new to portrait photography and I LOVE this book. Easy to read and follow, great tips and suggestions. I would say this book is definitely a beginners guide, so it was perfect for me!

I don't make my living in photography but many of my friends who are ladies 'of a certain' age have asked me to photograph them. I've found this book to be very helpful with posing to cover figure flaws and lighting to minimize the affects of age. Not everyone is a super model, nor should we strive, as photographers, to produce photos of people that don't look real. However, we should photograph them to their best advantage. I found Jeff's tips, hints and knowledge to be very helpful.

Jeff Smith's CORRECTIVE LIGHTING, POSING & RETOUCHING tells how to make subjects look their best using different lighting and posing techniques for studio or location setups. From digital techniques for minimizing defects to addressing common age- and weight-related issues, this is a 'must' for any photographer's tool kit!