Out here in the real world, few of us are perfect, which is why retouching can sometimes be a challenge for aspiring portrait photographers. In fact Cindy Crawford once said, “even I don’t look like Cindy Crawford when I get up in the morning!”

Although I’ve never owned an Oldsmobile automobile, I’ve always been a fan of the marque especially of their 442 models and any of the Hurst Old models.

At the moment I’m getting more and more accustomed to talking to the models while I’m painting, so as to keep the liveliness in their faces.”—Vincent Van Gogh (Letter to Theo van Gogh, Antwerp, Monday, 14 December 1885)

Many Photoshop plug-ins that let you convert color photographs to black & white, such as Silver Efex, also give you the option to apply the effect of applying colored filters to the monochrome conversation to make it seem as if you had placed a colored filter in front of your camera’s lens.

LED studio lighting systems are a good match for today’s high performance DSLRs and mirrorless cameras that have high ISO capabilities.