Sophie Luckiest Pillow Ever

Title says it all. This has to be the luckiest pillow ever.

Alyssa our makeup artist chose this picture and I had to oblige with all the fantastic work that she's put into each shoot that we've worked on together. Admittedly, the pillow draws a lot of attention away from the model and with the highlights treatment, it's almost completely blown out. That aside, it's not a bad shot... just not one that I would have picked for retouching.

Retouching-wise you can see that there's a trend towards this desaturated doll-like style that has occurred over the last couple Sophie pictures. I can't tell you whether this is just the flavor of the week or not but it is different and marks a divergence from the type of retouching that I've done before. One key thing to note about this style is the compressed tonal range and focus on the face. There are blown highlights and lost shadows. This is on purpose. On each of these pictures I'm trying to stretch the tonal range on the face which as we know is quite compressed as is. In order to expand that tonal range, we will lose the extremities on each end.

A note about the highlights and shadows. My dodge and burn techniques have gotten softer and softer. Previously I would push all highlights and shadows indiscriminately but now it's very selective with a lot of attention paid to the transition between highlights and shadows and everything in between. Not every highlight/shadow needs to be accentuated.

Strobist info: The same setup as "Sophie Just Legs". I moved the lights around so much in this set I can't remember exactly what was what. As I recall, 2 SB-800's shooting against black background for greyish effect. Main light is AB800 in 22" beauty dish not-gridded from camera upper left. For sure there's at least 1 rim light coming from camera right. No hair light in this one Probably 1 rim light coming from camera left as well but I don't see the evidence of it in this picture so the effect if any is negligible. The rim light is an AB800 in barndoors on the right.

Camera info: D3, 24-70mm f/2.8, 1/200th, f/8.0, ISO200, 70mm

Model/Wardrobe: Sophie Marquez

Makeup: Alyssa Fong