studio portrait camera settings
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
I did a photo session today and made a huge mistake with my camera settings… HELP!?
I have a little portrait studio and I did a photo session today with a family that drove a long distance for their session. I have been ill and therefor not as focused as I should have been and somehow my camera setting got knocked in to AV while taking their portraits so almost all of their shots are in AV. I can lighten them with no issues as I have photoshop but the file is filled with noise and has speckles that make it look grainy. Is there anything I can do to minimize this problem or make it less grainy? I am good at photoshop but not great so I thought I’d see if anyone had any ideas on here. It’s a free session so they aren’t out anything but they drove to far for me to have them come back out again. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Av is my standard setting as I can control depth of field. I use it for 80% of my pics and even some of my studio shots, you just have to watch the EV setting. I tend to use Manual in my studio as I know exactly what the light levels are, and a few test shots soon get exposure spot on. What Mode do you usually use?
Noise Ninja and all noise reduction programs work by selective blurring of the image, they are great for newspaper type resolutions, but have never worked well enough for me for high quality large prints.
If you shot in Jpeg theres not much hope as you’re going to have to remap the pixels in the file too far, being only 8bit they will fall to pieces. If you shot in Raw then by Photoshopping in 16bit mode you can get alot of detail out of the files without losing the smooth tones.
To be honest I would hold my hand up, admit my mistake and ask them for another chance, particularly as you’re doing it for free. Turning out rubbish pictures will not help you build a reputation for your studio which is all important. Time to bite the bullet, we’ve all done it.
Chris