Low-Key Portrait

[caleb]

1) Not enough light on dark eye?
2) I'm shooting at ISO-100 and the darks still get grainy/ugly!?
3) Other comments?

If you're screen is really bright and you kind of twist the monitor you can see the graininess that looks like jpeg artifacts (but aren't! i think?)

I also used a gaussian blur filter to hide minor skin blemishes... did I go overboard in some areas? I dunno first real attempt at this, comments/critique is really appreciated

[livin4lax09]

yeah they look like jpeg artifacts. what quality are you saving it at?

[caleb]

highest jpg on my camera. I could go raw for these I guess. I tried raw for a week or so and I didn't think the benefits outweigh the downsides for me personally. this might not be true for low-key pictures if it will let me avoid the artifacts though.

output at quality 80, bicubic, optimized from photoshop. However... even the photoshop file has these (not caused at output). I tried denoise adjustment, but it just seemed to change around where the artifacts were.

[jetrim]

I would try bumping up the lighting and the shutter speed a bit. This seems a touch dark even for low key

[caleb]

Good idea about the shutter speed (I used a super minimal amount of fill here that was basically negated by pp). Seems much easier to use ambient than fill. For some reason when using speedlights, my thinking is, "well, why the hell would I use light I can't directly setup/modify.. i'm shooting this at 1/200!"

Anyway, the one downside I suppose is that I'll have to get gels.