"Jeff H." wrote in news::
The way the scene is lit doesn’t look natural to me, I’m very sure it’s like a vignette type effect applied digitally later…. the forearm has no ambient lighting at all. It would be possible to shine a spotlight on her in a dark room to lose ambient light, but there’s no way her eyes would be that wide open with a spotlight in her face.
Not if you used constant lighting, no. But if you used a strobe with a snoot (paper tube to produce spotlight effect) on it… 😉
This is the reason I asked. Her face shows pretty direct light, just slightly above. Look at the shadow under her lips and nose, and how there’s no exposure whatsoever under her chin. But her right arm throws a shadow on the couch, and her shirt has too distinctive shadows, but apparently in another direction. That means a close light source. And it has to be raised above the subject a bit, not quite direct (flash bracket or separate stand) to only illuminate half of her left ear that way.
Very fast film and/or exposure adjusted for a bright flash can take the ambient lighting down to a dark level like this – all you need is a significant difference between the ambient light level and the flash output.
Contrast and saturation are high, but that can be done a number of ways, through film and processing to Photoshop.
It would be hard to duplicate this kind of lighting after the fact. You can vignette the image to produce a darker area outside the key interest, but it would take a ridiculous amount of work (for no good reason) to duplicate the lighting effects I pointed out.
But I think her face *has* been smoothed – the skin tone just looks a little too ‘porcelain’, given the rest of the image. And it stands up under magnification. If you look closely under her nose, you can see where it wasn’t smoothed so as not to take away the ridge detail there. Pretty good job overall though – you have to be looking for it, or very used to what skin looks like in conditions like this.
And for the original poster, this isn’t too hard to do. A duplicate layer with Gaussian Blur applied to blend the tones together smoothly, then Layer Masked to Hide All, with a little airbrushing on the mask to reveal the blurred layer only in the areas of the forehead and cheeks that you want smooth. If you do this, it’s a good idea to adjust the opacity of the blurred layer afterwards to make the effect very subtle. Faces that are *too* smooth attract attention to the editing.
– Al.
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