Digital Focus: Take Great Portraits

Feature: Taking Portraits the Digital Way

There's more to taking a good portrait than just asking someone to say "cheese." Good portraits--both the formal kind you make someone dress up for, as well as those casual portraits that look candid and relaxed--are all about FLB. You know, FLB: focus, lighting, and background. If you can control these three elements, you will amaze your friends with how great your portraits look. Of course, working digitally gives you an added advantage. You can tweak elements of the picture--like the focus and background--in ways that would be difficult or even impossible to do with a traditional camera.

Focus!

Let's start with focus, since it's an oft-neglected element of taking pictures. After all, everyone just assumes a good picture will be in focus. But the question you should ask yourself is this: What part of my photo needs to be in focus?

When you're taking a portrait, the one area that absolutely must be in focus is the eyes. You've heard the old saying, "the eyes are the window to the soul." Well, they're also the focal point of any portrait. Make sure the eyes are completely sharp by pointing the camera at your subject's face, locking the exposure (you can do that with most cameras by pressing the shutter release halfway down and holding it there with light finger pressure) and then composing the picture.

Let the Sun Do the Lighting

I'll be honest: I'm not a fan of pictures that are lit mostly by electronic flash. These photos tend to suffer from hot spots and harsh contrast that doesn't flatter the subject. Instead, I suggest that you try to take your pictures--especially portraits--with natural light. You'll get your best portraits outdoors, positioning your subject with the sun off to the side. Then set the flash to "fill" or "force" mode to eliminate any shadows on the face.

Blur the Background

Now for the last piece of the puzzle: the background. The trick is that the background really isn't important in a portrait. In fact, most portraits emphasize the subject by blurring the background. There are two ways to do that. The easy way is to set your camera to a small aperture value like f/2 or f/4. That will automatically blur the background for you.

If you can't get a blurry background when you shoot the portrait, fake it later. How? Open the picture in an image editor and blur the background while keeping the subject in sharp focus.

Getting Started: Begin by loading your picture into your favorite image editor (in my case, Paint Shop Pro) and selecting the appropriate tool. For this kind of job, I prefer using the Freehand tool, which looks like a lasso. In Paint Shop Pro, the Freehand tool has several modes; I suggest using Smart Edge, since you can use it to trace an irregularly shaped object--like a person's body. To activate Smart Edge, click the Freehand tool and then select Smart Edge from the Tool Options dialog box. You may have to open this dialog box by right-clicking the Tool Palette and choosing Tool Options from the menu.

Hint: It can be tricky to use the Freehand tool if you're not used to it. Draw a "lasso" around the edge you want to trace. When you get to the limits of what will easily fit in your lasso, hold the Shift key down, click a little further along the edge, and stretch out the lasso again. Repeat the process until you've gotten all the way around the subject.

Switch the Selection: Once the subject is fully selected--and you're sure you haven't selected a lot of the background in the process--it's time to pull a switch. It's the background that we want to blur, so choose Selections, Invert from Paint Shop Pro's menu. Now the background is selected, not the subject, and any commands we invoke won't affect the subject.

Blur It: Choose Blur from the Effects menu. You should see the background blur a bit. This is art, not science, so you may want to run this operation several times. When do you know you're done? You're done when the subject looks like it's floating above a fuzzy, indistinct backdrop. That's all there is to it. You can even blur the foreground as well as the background where appropriate. Try it--you'll find that with the right level of blurring, your portrait will look remarkably natural and put the emphasis on the subject, where it belongs.