This was a golden hour shot with an vintage Pentax 135mm on a Fuji XE2, shot close to maximum aperture. It's actually the first beauty shot I took.
I found that if I sharpened the eyes then the picture became too intimidating, so I made them much softer than usual. I'm interested in people's general comments and advice on the shot and the problems and tweaks for shooting male beauty.
...I wouldn't crop quite so aggressively on camera right these days!
Strong face and jawline! And love his hair! It's a great shot but I feel like it could have been just so much stronger. To me the crop doesn't work quite well. I'd either crop as 4:3 and have his eyes higher in the frame, or I'd have tried to frame differently when on set as I find his hair are taking over his eyes.
Not sure how you retouched the skin, but the texture is too soft for my taste. You may want to give dodging and burning a try. Or if you use frequency separation and like it, be more gentle with it. But again, not sure how you retouched.
>>> To me the crop doesn't work quite well.
As I think I said, it was the first close headshot I took and I had a strong belief in deliberate asymmetry at the time - too strong! It really shouts out "early shot", doesn't it?
>>> Not sure how you retouched the skin, but the texture is too soft for my taste.
I've no idea how I retouched it, but yes. I wish I had the original file (I'm not sure there even was a raw - I'd just bought an XE2 and might have been shooting jpg only.) But it's certainly not how I'd retouch now. (I'd do a wavelet split to 5 or 6 layers and work with clone on the upper ones and db on the lower.)
...What I'm wondering about is whether other people have found it necessary to make the eyes soft but well-lit in similar shots, when I'd make a woman's eyes sharp?
...Wavelet split is a trick you can pull with a tool called GMIC if anyone wants to try it.
"Too intimidating"? Care to elaborate on that? Well apart from the sloppy crop, which you've already addressed, and the skin retouching, it looks like you didn't quite expose for his face properly in camera and tried to salvage it in post. It's ok for a first attempt, but you might need to work on your use of light a bit more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydnRaCVrT7s
You can try the link above for some helpful tips.
>>it looks like you didn't quite expose for his face properly in camera and tried to salvage it in post. <<
Thanks, but no. I wanted the face to overload and have small highlights. You're making the mistake of thinking that everyone wants to shoot in the same style that you do. (Which is a great style, btw.)
I wanted that exposure and the touches of overloading highlight - to such an extent that when I found that I couldn't get the right behaviour out a standard digital sensor I very nearly switched to film. And only didn't because I found that a non-standard sensor that has "filmic" highlights. But even with that shot I was was shooting with a mirrorless so I could see exactly what I was going to get - so I could place the highlights. The way things came together for me after more work was like this
I do appreciate your response though, and you'd have been absolutely right 99 times out of 100. There's no way for you to have known that I'm obsessive about trying to use highlights in this weird way!