Occasionally I’ll find myself as the photographer for a professional event at my Alma mater. As a natural consequence of the demographic, there’s quite a few people there with severe acne and also scarring. I want to take flattering pictures of these people since they put in a lot of hard work into these events and they deserve to be recognized, however it’s something that makes people very self-conscious and delicate to broach.
Photoshopping it out (referring to more than just a few zits or pocks) is a possibility but events are geared more to volumes of photos than they are single highly polished ones like portraits, and this makes it not worthwhile to sit down and heavily repair dozens of photos, especially for the compensation. What can I do using my current equipment and workflows to make the most flattering pictures?
My equipment:
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Camera: D3200 with 35mm f1.8 lens, hotshoe flash and diffuser head — usually I step back and open the aperture as wide as I can get away with to soften features and shrink flaws
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Post: Bridge and Camera Raw — I’ll add additional softening and de-luminate/desaturate the reds. Reduce contrast. Desaturate or even go black and white.
Photography takes place anywhere from brightly day-lit offices to dim soirées. Sometimes I get lucky and I can pose people so it’s minimized.