Amanda and her MUA friend Liv joined me for a nice shoot back in February at the studio. We had a good time doing a number of things but this was one of my favorites. I tried to get a good balance of color and key off the red detail in the makeup by hitting the background with a blue gel to complement it. Hopefully the subtle difference in brightness is enough that you can see her hair separate from the background behind her head, but not every monitor will play nice with shadow details like that.
Shadow details are something I spend a great deal of time working on. It’s part of why this site has a dark background which I think is best for presenting images on computer screens effectively. If you looked at a great number of my photos on a lighter background (God forbid a white one, curse you Flickr!) you’d lose a lot of the image content. Even still, while that might give your eyes their best chance of seeing the detail in the shadows and enjoying full colors and contrast, not every monitor can really separate the tones in the deeper shadows. I’d rather that details be lost for some people than deliberately manipulate the image in some way to enhance their visibility on lower quality monitors. You can’t control the viewing equipment but you can at least try to control the signal!
In other news I’m currently working on something with the Munsell Color Blog and am really hoping to have that wrapped up this month. Stay tuned!
