There’s a great project in this month’s (April. 2006) Digital Camera Magazine. It’s about how to turn regular images into ethereal high-key portraits in Photoshop. High key lighting is a style that minimizes the contrast by keeping the light even and often overexposed. The colors and tones in the image remain light. I was excited to try it as a post production effect and took the perfect picture yesterday to test it on. The steps in the magazine were easy to follow for a Photoshop novice like myself, and I’m really pleased with the results. The technique is to push the midtones, boost the saturation and burn & dodge some of the details.

Here is my original shot. I used my Nikon D70s at f/4.8, 1/125 second at a focal length of 145mm (using my Nikon 70-210mm lens). I thought it looked underexposed and wanted to bring out some of the highlights. So I played with the mid-tones in the levels menu to get the second shot below. That’s as far as my Photoshop experience took me, so I followed the steps for the high-key technique in the magazine and got this result (bottom shot). My last step was to crop out the pink on the right side of frame, which I found to be distracting. Go out and grab the magazine and try a little high-key action!