January 2, 2012 – A year of portraits – Susan Cruzan

Susan is one of my morning walking partners and as you can tell she doesn’t like to be cold! This mornings walk at the Madisonville City Park was rather brutal for all of  use, what with the temperature being one of the colder days we’ve had and a pretty stiff wind didn’t help us to stay warm much, but seeing her bundled up like this was a portrait just waiting to happen.

I shot this with my iPhone 4 with the standard camera, but I couldn’t really get it to look the way I wanted it too using the photo processing app on the iPhone though, so I opened it up in Photoshop CS5 to do my editing.

Basically did some dodging, burning and sharpening to come up with the final portrait. I did use the Topaz Adjust Clarity filter to achieve the sharping I wanted. If you’ve not used this plug-in for Photoshop before you should check it out as it has a lot of nice presets that you can also fine tune to your own liking. Of course you can achieve the results yourself via the different controls in Photoshop via layer masking, sharping, levels and things like that, but for me, I don’t like reinventing the wheel so to speak.

Susan is an excellent teacher by trade, among many other talents, and having just finished her Masters and is looking for work. So, if you’re hiring… let me know!