Friday, October 31, 2014

photo shoot with aspiring actress

headshot of an aspiring actress with beauty retouching
this must have been my first photo shoot with an aspiring actress in dc. the lady contacted me and expressed her desire to have a makeup artist. I kinda thought that makeup was not necessary for actors headshots but women just want to look gorgeous. the makeup artist showed up early as usual. this was gonna be the third time we worked together. when the lady arrived I saw that she had a few blemishes on the face that she might have wanted to conceal with the makeup. 
she was very concerned about how she would look on the pictures and I was doing my utmost best to give her assurances. everybody knows that makeup can only go that far and for skin badly flawed the help of photoshop is a must. I have quite an extensive background in photoshop from my experience as a graphic designer and am used to retouching pictures myself. I promised the lady that photoshopping would take care of the blemishes makeup wouldn't cover and showed her some sample of glamour retouching from some fashion magazines. 
the shoot went quite well. after she made her selection, I did some basic retouching on all of the pictures except one that I found the best and did some beauty retouching on it. beauty retouching is just using photoshop airbrushing to give extra gloss to the pictures just like those you see in fashion magazines. when I sent the pictures expecting a thank you, I got a response that I was supposed to glamorize all of the 12 pictures that she selected. 
I said that it would take me about 25 min to glamorize pictures and to apply that treatment to 12 pictures would be too much for the $99 she paid me. she wouldn't have it. she wanted her money back, which I refused. I made a mistake. she would harass me over a period of nearly a year. to this day, I regret not refunding her money. it would've cost me less in headaches.

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