Tips for Natural Looking Portraits

Here's a nice article on portrait photography. The Human Side of Photography - 4 Tips for Natural Looking Portraits:

"The Human Side of Photography - 4 Tips for Natural Looking Portraits

The following post on The Human Side of Photography is by Natalie Norton from natalienortonphoto.com.

Over the years my camera has become an extension of my arm, relate? Of course you do. Those lucky souls like you and I who discover they have a passion for photography quickly find it to be magically intoxicating in every way. We just can’t get enough."

The goal of portrait photography is to capture the likeness of a person or a small group of people, typically in a flattering manner. Like other types of portraiture, the focus of photograph is the person's face, although the entire body and the background may be included. Many people enjoy having professionally made family portraits to hang in their homes, or special portraits to commemorate certain events, such as graduations or weddings.

Worth reading if you're looking to improve your portrait photography.

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100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art

Each one starts as a thumbnail that can be hovered over to display more information. A truly great resource.

Visit 100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art

One example is this one:

The idea behind this image was fairly simple – the profile of a young woman. I had a reasonably clear picture in my head before I started, the girl’s expression, the art nouveau abstraction of her hair and headwear, and the visual style. I wanted to use blue, since I feel that my art relies a bit too heavily on warm palettes. You can clearly see the influence of some of my favourite artists; Alphonse Mucha, Moebius and Yoshitaka Amano. Blue was created with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, but these techniques can be applied to all the most recent versions. I use a Wacom Graphics tablet.