Beauty And The Brand: Editorials

I had a good selection of editorial images and I narrowed the selection down to 7.
There wasn't much editing that I have done on them apart from the under eye circles, the flyaway hair (in the evening look expecially) and the colour of the background. On her skin I have only toned down the shine that was on her forehead. The rest of her skin was left untouched, partly because my model had great skin, but I didn't want to over edit the images as there is a very thin line between good, subtle editing and over editing. Imperfections are not always a bad thing and I wanted to make her look as natural and 'NARS' as possible.

As I didn't want to use the bikini she wore at the shoot in my images, and wanted only closeups of her face, I edited only three images and the others didn't look right when cropped, expecially the ones with her hands in her hair. Sharon pointed out that her head was tilted too much when I showed her one of the images and she said that Nars shoots from the front. Immidiately I remembered the book I have and all the portraits so I decided to choose the close up of her face as my final look.

As you will see in the first three images I was testing the Burn Tool to see how bronzed I could make her look, but it looked too unnatural. In the third image was the image I submitted. I have posted many versions on here of where to place the text, or if I should even use it. The text I was thinking of using was just the models name, my name and the brand's website butI decided to just use the logo only in all editorial images. They look clean and I didn't want to throw everything on the image as it could distract the viewers. This way, if anyone saw the images in the magazine can see the logo and research it from there if they wanted to.

Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial day look

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I spent a LOT more time editing the flyaway hair around her hair and other bits around the evening looks as the hair was slicked so needed it to look nice and polished. I also fixed her hair line slightly as that was another thing that Sharon pointed out to me. Then the dress was also fixed slightly and the background, too.

I tried to even out the background by picking up one of the tones from the original image, I tried black (but didn't fully edit the edges as I didn't think it went with the summer look) and I also picked up the tone from the day looks. The day images and evening have different toned background as they were not shot in the same studio and for the evening look I had two lights while for the other had only one.

The first image below was definitely my favourite and I always kept going back to it. Even though the dress is not very glamorous, she looks very classy and like she owns the world. This was the kind of facial expression I wanted for my editorial look.

As I couldn't decide on the dress, I submitted one of them as well. I liked the one where she looks up as it is different than others where she is looking at the camera, and the make up and hair looked good from her profile. I was playing around so in one image you will see that I got rid of the pony tail completely, but I used the one with the pony tail as my final image.

I didn't submit the look with the necklace but I edited it and used as one of the images in my mini magazine spread that I have created along side my final editorials.

I decided to place the logo in the top left corner, which is the opposite from where the logo is in the day look. Day and night are opposites, so are the effects of the Dual Intensive eyeshadows, and the logo placement also tells the images appart.

Editorial evening look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial evening look

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Editorial evening look

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Editorial evening look

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Editorial day look

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Editorial evening look

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Editorial day look

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Although I said I'd try to put some overlays, background etc., and I did it, but I didn't like it. Honestly, I didn't want to over-do it but also, it is one thing to say what you are going to do but when you actually start editing you realize "OK, maybe this looks better, the idea I had would've been too much."

I know the background looks a bit unnatural and that the lighting that is on her doesn't match it. I just cut her out and placed the background then, just played around with the adjustments and opacity, it took me about 15 minutes and I used two different images as background.