muse-of-maestro – I’ve been lost in my own skin lately. The season is about to change and so, to, must I. (2017)

I see literally hundreds of boudoir selfies and self-portraits slide across my Tumblr dash every damn day–the idea is painfully self-same; the execution is almost universally shitty.

This, though? This is effing intriguing.

Yeah, you’ve gotta ding some points for the camera not being exactly level–but neither are the frames on the wall, so it could feasibly be that. (I’d bet that it’s both, fwiw.)

Also, it’s overexposed by more than a stop–the adage for analog being expose for shadow, develop for highlight gets reversed with working with digital; in other words: expose for the highlight by making sure the brightest area of the frame is what your exposure (when something digital is overexposed it leaves you zero data to work) and then add shadows back in post. (I’ll never be an adherent when it comes to digital but having just returned from Iceland where I shot an equal amount of film and digital for the first time ever, I can say that if you abide by this dictum, you’ll be able to correct things enough to get a usable shot in post.)

I actually copied this image into the iPhone editing interface–which is infuriating until you realize that the engineers have built out the workflow in such a fashion to teach the user through repetition how each adjustment interacts with the base image and subsequently applied adjustments. (Getting the hang of this will actually sharpen your Photoshop chops immeasurably.)

But yeah, I corrected the overexposure as best I could. (The rainbow artifacting along the left edge, near the middle is a result of the lack of data from overexposure.) Adjusted for a more balanced skin tone–added some shadows (if I was doing it in Photoshop I’d have gone back and selectively dialed back the shadows on the right most frame–which go too dark in this edit.)

Pushed the color just a little and then added a bit of a warmer cast.

And viola! You can see that although it’s imperfect there’s a bit of the feel of a Flemish oil painting to this–which is likely what I responded to upon seeing this.