processing for the most skin detail

Could you give me some tips on processing (or lighting) so that I retain the most detail in skin- pores, stubble

etc...

 

Thanks!

Try and look up cross-lighting. Generally any light coming at an angle will produce more pores etc..

Use hard lighting set up to cast shadows of the stubble, pores, pimples, etc. Then boost the contrast and sharpness in Photoshop until you can't stand it any more. That should do it. What you're basically after is the opposite of all the techniques used for flattering glamour and celebrity portraits.

beyond lighting with non diffused small lighting sources, if you are using Lightroom 2 to process with try using the Sharpening landscape preset and and then pushing the Clarity slider really high.

In many outdoor photos (and some indoor), you will often find skin pores, wrinkles, razor stubble, etc., much accented in the blue channel. So try this: Using Photoshop in RGB mode, go to channels pallette. Click on Blue channel. Select ALL. Copy it. Go back to Layer pallette, create a new layer and past the copied blue channel into it. Sharpen the new blue layer (and otherwise make curves adjustments etc so tone is suitable). Then change the blending mode on that new layer to "luminosity." Voila.

Thanks so much you guys- your tips really helped and I think I used all of them! Oh- except I didn't use cross lighting due to a large window that was at the location and I used clarity in ARC (I don't have lightroom) but still it helped a bunch. The blue channel, sharpening etc all helped very much...

 

Thanks again- just what I needed :)

Your final product going to be B&W or colour? It's very easy to crank things up for B&W by using the channel

mixer. Check out each channel beforehand to see which one you want most of and mix away. After that, try an

S-curve or simple contrast increase.

Thanks Neal, in a way I did that. I used a regular conversion on the bottom layer and then added a layer of only the blue channel set to soft light (along with heavy clarity an sharpening). I used really shallow dof with a ts lens so the effect is probably lessened, but I'm still happy with these results...

 

Thanks again :)<div></div>