This headshot of Arlo was pretty straight forward – I just did a little skin clean up using frequency separation, dodged and burned the shadows and highlights to give the face more dimension and sharpened the eyes and added some contrast to make them stand out.

Arlo has beautiful skin – so there wasn’t much to do. The final steps were color grading the shot, adding a slight vignette and sharpening it for export. For color grading I usually use different techniques – this time I used three adjustment layers: levels to crush the blacks and add some blues to the shadows, color balance to infuse some warm tones into the highlights and hue/saturation to pull down the saturation a bit.