Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye in The Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Kevin who is an advanced photographer from the U.K.

I don’t have all the metadata on this one. We know that this portrait was shot with a Lensbaby, one of my favorite lenses. So I just want to get right into what I like about this one. And let me go ahead and say that I’m inside of Photoshop CS3 and recording this on the road. And what you’ll see me do within the next week is come back and put this image in the digital darkroom, and I’m going to go through and show you specifically all the things I’ve done in Photoshop to work on the portrait right now. We’re just kind of look at the layers and not look at all the masking and everything.

And right when I look at this portrait one of the things I love about the Lensbaby is its ability to draw my eye to the most important thing in the scene because of the selective focus nature of the Lensbaby. If you don’t know about the Lensbaby, this is special to a lens that has a switch file of focus right in the middle of the field of view, and it’s normal lens, 50 mm lens and a very fast lens if you shoot it wide open. It’s an F2 lens when you combine the shallow depth of field that you can get it 50 mm at F2 with the idea that the fun element is distorted and you have a switch file to focus in distortions around the edges. It can do a really neat job at one time drawing your eye to the switch photo focus.

One of the other things I love about the Lensbaby is because that switch file of focus is in the middle of the field of view, it sort of encourages you to break a rule which is don’t center your subject here. Kevin is centering the portrait subject, but because of this distortions even though the mask here are the main subject to the image is centered you get a real strong sense of dynamic movement towards that middle, and so it doesn’t fill static here especially seen in those distortions in the lower part of the image where you have detailed down in here that can be distorted.

I’m also enjoying the idea here of a simplicity and separation from the background. There’s a little bit of the background that I want to change, but the portrait subject here separating from the background. I’m enjoying in the image the filling of the symmetry and the centering which can set up a filling of two, and then you’ve got the two sunflowers up here. I think that works really well.

It’s subtle but the head is tilted here. You see get a little bit of movement of the diagonal layer, and the two sunflowers are on the diagonal and you have two areas that come off of the sunflowers that make a pair. The way this person is turned and the way that this has been framed you have the two halves of the body, so I like that filling of centering and then getting a filling that sort of symmetry and pairs of two the beads or sort of doing the same thing.

There’s also a filling of soft light in this image and the way that is falling on the mask and the reflectivity of the mask is also really bringing this as the main subject and a pretty neat from a color standpoint. You know if you got this real strong feeling of warm and cool playing off of each other in a dynamic ways sort of blue and yellow pretty powerful, and then you get it the third color in there which can make things dynamic, the green.
When you started thinking about perfect world improvement for this image, one of the things that I want to do almost right away when I looked at the image is if you’re open to change and the edit or content images get rid of these real strong harsh on the lines in the back. There’s so much movement in this image that goes off and makes this a sort of growing vertical shape, and then there’s real strong harsh on the line right here in the image to be really sort of stops me, and this is a pretty major distraction and I’d like to make that go away in the image.

The other thing that I’d think of right away when I look at this image is with all the pairs of twos in this image and the feeling of centering and symmetry. Once that sort of get set up for the viewer then when that falls apart it can be real obvious and this hand is making such a strong gesture. It’s pointing on one of the major diagonals. It’s pointing to the main subject, and that starts to leave this area of the image for me really out of balance. So since we’re already going to change editorial content once I start going on that road, the other that I would consider doing is taking this hand, putting on its own layer and flipping it, and putting it in here, so there’s a real strong sense of symmetry.

From there, I’d like to open up the eyes. One of the cool things about this is we’re very surreal with the mask and the custom of the hat, and all of these things that give this feeling of sort of theatrical but then you can see when you look to the mask, the hand of detail in the eyes I’d like to bring that out even more to add more depth to the image. So, on a bigger print of yours sort of this confronted with this kind of surreal color and the custom and they look closer they will say there’s another level of reality in there, so bring the eyes out.

And then the other thing that I’d like to do is just create a vignetting mask in this image to make all the corners darker, to continue to try and make the main subject even more dynamic. So I’m going to just go through here, and turn in the layers where I’ve done the work there. I got rid of harsh on the lines in the background. It makes a big difference in the way that you look at this image and the way that your eye moves. You just don’t get stop anymore moving up and down. It lets that vertical movement happen.

The next thing that I did was I took the one hand and flipped it and layered it in there. So you can see what you think about sort of continuing the pair of twos and the symmetry. The next thing that I did was darkened all the way around sort of the vignetting mask. I popped the eyes there. I have to add another sort of room to the image, more depth to the image and then I started to feel like running out of this texture up here.

Now that I’ve done this working, got and rid of these real strong lines in the back that that felt out of balance. So I took this information over here and over here and I layer it in at the top to keep that filling of texture going. First on the left and second on the right, and then I came in and I felt like this now is a little too heavy and I just knocked that back a bit and the last thing I did was even more of sort of the filling of vignetting.

Here’s where we started and here is where we ended up. And the truth is you can keep going with this. We just finished our workshop in Zion National Park and had some people on the workshop. They’re very, very good at retouching. They’re very good at Photoshop and we were talking about how in images that you really like that you can spend an enormous an amount of time in the dark room. I think that you can get to this point and then say, “You know I’m really going to work on this image from the color standpoint.” I think there are ways that you can make color separate.

Right now, there’s a bit of a cast to the whole thing, a little bit of the yellow kind of gold cast and you could go and start working that. But we’re going to leave it right here. Again for the day, we want to turn that on and off one more time, and then go back to the original.

I love this use of the Lensbaby. I love this portrait subject. I really like the fact that Kevin shows this person as a portrait subject. I just think color is really beautiful quality of light. It’s working really well here and the way Kevin has framed this. I really like the sense of symmetry this set up, but also a real strong feeling of vertical movement.

We want to say a big thank you to Kevin for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eye in the Daily Critique, see you tomorrow everybody.