Portrait Editing Part I: Culling & Raw Conversion by Payton Ruddock

Today we have the pleasure to feature " Portrait Editing". A series of 6 articles written by Payton Ruddock  (website), we hope you enjoy with this master class:

I’ve been trying to really do a lot more behind the scenes lately, and the majority of the videos revolve around actually shooting the photos. I want to try to round that out with two different series of videos on retouching and really explain and show y’all what I’m doing without any filters or strings attached. What you see is what I’m doing to cull, edit, Photoshop, and finish the images that I capture in camera broken up in into a series of videos to make theme a little more easily digestible.

The first of those series is starting today and being carried out over the course of the next month or so with the videos breaking down like this:

Portrait Editing:

Part I: Culling Images and Raw Conversion
Part II: Wacom Tablet Introduction and Initial Clean Up
Part III: Dodging & Burning
Part IV: Frequency Separation
Part V: Tone and Color Grading
Part VI: Finishing the Image & Extras

So, you can see that we’re really going to try and go through the entire process with an image from a recent shoot. You’ll get to see me edit, talk through my conscience, screw up – and yes, everybody screws up, that’s the beauty of Undo! – and work through the difficulties and fun of taking a photo to its final state.

Hopefully y’all will join along for the ride and let me know what else you’d like to see along the way. I’m looking forward to sharing this with y’all and hopefully doing a bunch of educational and informational videos like these to keep helping you find your creative voice your way.


PART I

As you can see in the video, we’re going through my process of culling down images to the ones I want to edit and finish. You get to see it directly from when I was finished shooting these images so you can see the edits I made to the images as they came out of the camera and why I do that, as well as what I do with those edits before I finally export for Photoshop.

The culling process is one of the things that I find trickiest and trying to pick out that final image that is your hero image is extremely difficult so hopefully getting to see me actually compare photos and talk through why I like certain poses over others is helpful to you as well.

If you’re wanting to see something different, feel free to leave me a comment below or shoot me a message and I’ll be sure to answer your questions as quick as I can or address it in the next video!