I had a business portrait client come for a refresh after about a 10+ years hiatus. She said, “I was waiting for someone to say, ‘So are working with your daughter now?’” after looking at her current head shot. A reminder to me to keep my own biz portrait up-to-date. While the studio was set up, I made a few images of yours truly and found some new tools in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR).

Making the image

I usually look for simplicity in my business portrait. A white background and a white shirt make the face the area of highest contrast. The area of highest contrast is where the eye will go first. It also makes it easy to extract the headshot for multiple uses and placing on a different background if necessary.

images from self business portrait

I used the Pluto Trigger to fire the camera remotely. The trigger is plugged into the camera’s remote port. The accompanying phone app triggers the camera. Pluto Trigger does way more than just fire your camera, but that’s a whole other article!

First stop: Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Since my studio has slightly yellow walls the reflected color skews the image warm. A quick use of the color adjustment dropper neutralizes the color with a click on the white backdrop. If there’s no white in the scene, I make sure to photograph a Color Checker Chart and use that for getting the image neutral.

adobe camera RAW person selection
ACR person selection with mask.
Adobe camera RAW Person masks options
ACR Person masks options. You can dial in very specific areas.
Adobe camera RAW masks options
Note how ACR only selected skin that was not the face.

When I went into the mask area of ACR I found a new (to me) feature of picking people automatically. The best part is once the person is selected you can individually select eyes, whites of eyes, teeth, facial skin and body skin. This makes basic retouching easy.

Next stop: Photoshop

Once the image has been massaged in ACR, the file is opened in Photoshop for final work. The selected areas shown are fixed. There was an annoying shadow in the crease of the shirt. A repair fill in the top corner and a use of the Patch Tool applied to the shadows under the eyes. The layer is copied Patch Tool applied to remove wrinkles and the opacity is lowered to bring back realistic detail.

Once in Photoshop retouched the beard, removed some stray hairs, fixed the corner and lightened shadows in the bottom right corner.
Photoshop Layers Palette. Base layer with copy showing tweaks, a burn layer and adjustment layers for the BW conversion.

For myself, as well as my clients, I do a conversion to black and white, so there is good contrast. Many times if you send off a color image that will be converted to BW, all that is done a desaturation which results in a milky black and white. In this case I used Photoshop’s Black and White adjustment layer and added a little contrast with a Curves adjustment layer.

business portrait retouching sample
My business portrait retouching image example final using Photoshop and ACR.

Keep your business portrait up-to-date

Don’t let your business portrait go so long that people wonder who the person is on your business card or website.

Yours in Creative Photography, Bob