First of a new feature here on Japanorama with Alfie doing some post-pro on images sent in by readers. Send yours in to get some treatment.

A lot of people ask me – via my Flickr pages, blog and by email – how I get the tone, colour and treatment on my photos. A lot of it is down to having spent 30-years shooting film and about fifteen of those years messing around in darkrooms. I know what a certain film, shot a certain way, processed in certain chemistry and printed on a particular grade of paper looks like. That’s the main set of experiences that shape the way I use Photoshop to process my images.

Then, I get a certain feeling when I shoot the picture of how i want it to look when I process it. So when I press the button on the camera on-site, I have a pretty good idea of the ‘feel’ of photo I want at the end of the post-processing.

Lastly, since using Photoshop all the way from Version 1.0, I have built up as set of preferred tools, plugins and actions.

I may not be a Photoshop guru, I just like what I like and have spent some time putting together a ‘lightroom’ that mirrors what I used to like doing with the lights off!

So, without further ado, here is today’s ‘pimped’ pic, courtesy of Charlie Kirk - a buddy of mine here in Tokyo, who has taken a few lessons with me and Japanorama. See Charlie’s Flickr stream here.

The following gallery explains the process. The two images below are, from the top down, the original and my ‘pimped version. The modus-operandii being to render her skin slightly warmer and generally make the model look as good as possible.

It’s worth noting at this point that a lot of this whole process is very personal. The finished item is not something I would call ‘perfect’, it’s just one take on how I would process it and I stopped short of going over the top with it, preferring to keep it as ’straight’ as possible and just squeeze out the beauty in the model.

The Original

After Post-Processing

Gallery of Screengrabs, Original and Finished Versions

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

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Want us to ‘Pimp Your Pic’?

Send through a JPEG to us at info[atmark]japanorama.co.uk, putting ‘Pimp My Pic’ in the subject header and Alfie will work some magic on it for you. Please keep JPEGs at decent quality but please don’t send files that are bigger than 2mb. Thanks. Also, if there is a specific ‘feel’ you want to the image, let Alfie know in the email.

Thanks