CONCEPT

The central idea behind this portrait was to emulate the style, composition, and general vibe of vintage Shanghai studio portraits that generally feature women looking into the distance.

ORIGINAL IMAGE

Shot in landscape (oops) but cropped into a portrait.

WORKFLOW

I started out generally cleaning the image with the healing brush and clone stamp, then went into the finer details on the skin with dodging and burning before going into separation frequency. I found cleaning up stray hair to be the most challenging, I felt like I had a tendency to overdo it and leave the image looking overworked even tho I did attempt to add noise back so that it wouldn’t be overly milky 🙁 liquifying was kept to a minimum, mostly just to even out some weird lumps on her palm.

OUTCOME

link to final PSD file here

desaturated the image and threw on a curve layer for fun, just to see if the image would resemble my visual references