Articles written by Nino Batista

I have been asked countless times over the past few years about how I go about culling and selecting portrait shots from a shoot. Frankly, I have had so much trouble trying to organize my thoughts on the matter into a cohesive tutorial, I opted to simply never do one. Until quite literally this morning. My approach was to click record and improvise whatever popped into my head. So, as the catchphrase says, "Here goes nothing!"

I'm back today with another utility Action for you all to download, for free, and see how it works for you. It deals with luminosity mask level control of what I often call the Big Three of image control: highlights, mids, and shadows. It's the most common use of luminosity masks, so, why not streamline it into an Action?

Short version of the story: I love issuing challenges to the awesome readers of Fstoppers, but I also have this wild schedule of mine that changes at a moment's notice this year. So, without wasting more of your time, I'll just say "my bad" and get right to the Capture One Pro EIP Challenge winner.

I'm back with yet another editing contest, but this one has a twist you'll either love or hate. As I was recently in San Francisco teaching alongside Dave Gallagher, CEO of Capture Integration, for our course on CreativeLive, it occurred to me that almost no one (at least) that I knew personally edited solely in Capture One. That is, taking an image to completion using nothing but Capture One, which would mean not using the sacred Adobe Photoshop in any way. Challenge accepted?

If you've seen my quick tutorial videos about the Photoshop actions that I make and use in my workflow before, then you know I am obsessed with detailed control of everything from shadows and highlights to color and texture. Today, I'm reviewing one of my newer actions, high and low contrast boost control, and showing you why I use it.

The iconic AlienBee has been one of the most popular strobe units ever since their debut in 2001, and for good reason. Developed to be the perfect balance of price and quality (which is something that's tricky to pull off in the world of gear) their reputation spread quickly. Sure, you can always spend many, many, many thousands of dollars on studio lights in order attain top quality equipment, but it's never been easy purchasing a strobe rig when more restrained budgets are a concern. Enter Paul C. Buff.

It's been a long time coming, but today's episode of my weekly web series, The Backyard, finds my co-host Staci and myself reviewing our three favorite edits from (what I dubbed) the Dani Diamond Experiment, posted almost two months ago. I allowed you all to download a raw file I shot of Staci in Miami and let you loose on it to retouch it as you saw fit. The results? Let's take a look.

Recently I babbled on and on about shadow and highlight recovery using raw data in Capture One Pro, something I still fully endorse and recommend you do in your post production work when recovery is needed or wanted. However, feedback and practical thinking made me create a simple Photoshop Action that sets up one of my more common methods for simple shadow recovery, but in a refined and manual way.

One of my favorite little quips to drop on my workshop attendees is "Did you know that models are, as it turns out, human?", which usually just yields a few chuckles. But the truth is, that is just my lead in and my way of sarcastically reminding model photographers that fashion and glamour models have opinions, preferences, and emotions as much as anyone else. Which is sadly something that seems to be overlooked in the often callus industries of fashion and glamour. To that end, I invited some Texas based pro models to sit down with Staci and I discuss the industry.