Edit your nudes to perfection
Maintain the natural beauty of your nude imagery with careful edits
Nude photography is all about capturing the raw and natural essence of the body, so it is extremely important that you avoid overprocessing your imagery. Although a thorough retouch can create stunningly flawless results, unless your final shot is for a commercial beauty campaign, we’d recommend that you keep it as natural as possible. Keep the texture and blemishes, and you don’t need to smooth out every bump, crease and wrinkle. The more natural the image looks the more interesting and intimate it will be. Remember it’s all about the model and their body – removing too much will detract from the essence of the shot.
Converting nude imagery to black and white is a popular choice and is a great way of creating tasteful artistic shots. Removing the colour helps to make the image appear less erotic and ‘in your face’. The bare skin and exposed body parts almost become secondary elements to the image and instead a black and white edit ensures that the image is all about the shapes and tonality of the body. Choosing to make the image black and white will also hide some blemishes and redness without having to do a big retouch. It will also emphasise the texture in the skin.
Nielsen says, “I tend to overdo things, I have often spent 50+ hours working on just one DROPS image [one of Nielsen’s projects]. I could easily make a preset or action that could do 80 per cent of what I want right away, but like beauty retouching, nothing beats doing things manually – and by dodging and burning.
“My workflow starts in Capture One Pro, but apart from culling, adjusting exposure, contrast and using the Color Editor to even out the light a bit, I do all of my [editing] work in Photoshop.
“I rarely use Liquify, but prefer to use the light and shadows to shape the body, and also to stay true to my goal of showing the models the way they are in real life. For black and white photos I use Nik Silver
Efex Pro and for colour photos use many different methods. Right now, I like using a combination of Gradient Maps and blending modes to tone the photos slightly. When editing DROPS photos, I spend a lot of time carefully dodging and burning every single drop of water – so that might add up to several thousand edits, but the result is worth it, giving an almost three-dimensional quality to the drops.”