I’m pretty ashamed of myself to be honest.

As I come to the end of my 30 image challenge, I decided that I should go through and have a quick look at what I’ve achieved so far. While doing this, I realised, rather uncomfortably, that I only had two images that represented Women of Colour out of the 25 images I had done so far.

This was, and still is, woefully inadequate.

So off I went and dug through my folders of RAW files that I’d procured from various free websites.

I found three images in my folders, all of this same model. They’re gorgeous. I was really drawn to this image by the model’s smile – it just beams out of the photo.

It was a pretty fast retouch too – only a day or so – the model has great skin, and I think the thing that took the longest was actually fixing the slight texture issue on her cheek. I also had to get my head around burning more, rather than dodging more (like I usually do). I didn’t want to change the skin tone and make it lighter in any way. In fact, the only colour change I did to her skin involved pulling just a tad (like, 1 point) of magenta out of her skin tone using curves, thus making it less flushed (I learnt this from the Dennis Dunbar workshop I mentioned in my last post. It can be found here.)

Select the skin with the top picker while in the green channel (looks like a hand), and then using the up and down keys on your keyboard move accordingly. Going up adds green, going down adds magenta (the opposite of green). Mask as desired and set to colour blending mode (I used colour range to select the skin tones in the image).

It was with this image I also did something I haven’t done for an extremely long time – I used layer styles. I believe I last used these back in my undergrad days – so early 2000’s? I had removed the original logos using a combination of clone stamp and content aware fill, and while I could have stopped there I decided to have a little fun. So I added in my own initials instead. 😊 A short fiddle around with gaussian blur, blending modes, and noise later, and I was done.

That’s enough of my yammering though, lets move onto the before and after!

Warning though, I did crop it in Capture One, so nothing lines up anymore. I wanted to get rid of the distracting post in the background, and focus more tightly in on the model.

Hope you’re having a great day, and as always, feel free to leave your thoughts below! See you next time!