Porcelain

Porcelain

This is all about a processing technique that I learned from a model’s partner: so thank you Dan, for sending me a link that has served me very well for several years. Also thanks are due to George, whose comment on my gallery post yesterday prompted me to look at a colour version of an image.



Anyway, porcelain. The name suggests delicacy, lightness – and that’s what it’s all about. To achieve it, you need to work from a RAW image, or, at least, to use Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop or Elements. If anybody can translate this into Lightroom for people who use that to edit, I’d be grateful!



As you can see from the pictures of Black Beauty, this isn’t a technique that works with images that rely on dark tones for effect. These end up looking weak, like underexposed darkroom prints. As the shot of the Polaroid camera shows, dark tones are fine, providing they are only playing a supporting rôle.



So what do you do (apart from play with the sliders?) Here are my starting suggestions:

After opening the file in Adobe Camera Raw, begin by altering the exposure by around +2 stops. Don’t worry, at this stage, if you are blowing highlights. We’ll be dealing with them as we go.
Next, reduce Contrast, Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation with the individual sliders. I suggest starting around -60, -50, -40 and -40, but if you want to vary the look, just play with those sliders.
If, at this stage, the highlights look blank AND that looks wrong, pull back the highlights slider. This is a technique that produces subtle images, but some of the adjustments aren’t subtle. The vignette portrait of Emi1 has -100 adjustment of the highlights.



Sometimes, you may want to bring in strong blacks, or colours. If so, use the Blacks and Saturation sliders – go negative with the former, and positive with the latter. If you only want to emphasise on colour (as in my shot of Annabel Adamse), it may be better to open the file and then adjust the colour saturation using Image/Adjustments/Saturation for individual colours (these are selectable as a drop-down from where it says ‘Master’ in the dialogue box).



This will be incredibly basic stuff for those of you who (unlike me) routinely use Layers and spend hours on editing. But for a three-minute experiment that might just give you one or two impressive images, give it a go.

It’s also thoroughly counter-intuitive for many people, who automatically increase Clarity, Vibrance, and so on. Don’t worry: to follow the Julia Margaret Cameron line yet again, it looks beautiful. And for female portraits, it’s incredibly flattering to tweak Clarity and Vibrance downwards as a matter of course, gently softening imperfections, without turning skin to Barbie plastic.



Big Hint – as soon as you start processing, use ‘Save As’ to create an image with a different name so that you don’t mess up the source file. If you do this as a matter of routine, you don’t have to worry about ‘non-destructive editing’! I have simple tastes in editing.

Go on. Play and enjoy the freedom.