HOW TO NUDES 101 : POST-PROCESSING
Hello and welcome everyone to episode 3 of Twist Tries to Teach Taking Tentalizing Tableaux. On today's program, post-processing or as you may know it, photo editing. For today we are going to use a photo I took for the first tutorial, which was left untouched, and see what various basic settings do to it.
First, let's look at Brightness.
What the brightness setting does is raise or lower the brightness of all your pixels, basically shifting everything up or down, preserving the differences between pixels. It's like when playing a chord on a piano and moving to a different octave - all the notes are at the same distance from one another but everything is lower or higher.
Next, still looking at ways to shift lightness, let's see about Contrast.
What Contrast does is sort of the opposite of Brightness - it does not shift everything, it just influences the difference between pixels. More Contrast means that bright pixels become brighter and darker pixels become darker - less Contrast shifts the pixels towards the middle of the scale. - however, the extremes are not changed. To use my earlier musical analogy, the highest and lowest notes of the chord do not change, but the middle ones do.
Next, let's look at Shadows and Highlights.
Now what these do is the same thing as Brightness, except it only affects certain pixels - for Highlights, it only shifts the brightest ones, for Shadows, it only shifts the darkest ones. You can see that Shadows 100 doesn't make the lighter parts of my shoulder brighter, it only brightens up the shadows - and vice-verse for Highlights.
Next let's look at colors. First, Saturation.
Saturation is like the volume of your colors. By raising or lowering Saturation, you amp up your colrs or tone them down - this will not change the hue of your photo, only how intense that hue is. To change the colors, you have to look at...
Color Temperature and Tone.
Color Temperature is a scale that goes from Cold to Warm (basically blue to orange), Tone is a scale that goes from Green to Pink. These won't immediately tint your whole photo a certain color - they will only shift the colors closer to one or the other extreme.
I personally don't believe that there is a right or wrong way to do post-processing, however I would recommend staying away from settings like Exposure, Brilliance and Sharpness, because they are pretty much meaningless and/or very hard to control on basic a mobile phone photo editing program.
Natural light tends to be warmer than artificial light, which is why you often look a lot more pale when you take photos inside. If you feel like your skin looks a bit flat or dead, try making your photo warmer.
While yes, you can do black and white by just setting Saturation to 0, this will end up in flat, boring looking B&W photos - try fiddling with Brightness and Contrast before removing the colors, you'll thank me later.
Algorithms that detect nude photos are trained on nude photos. Most nude photos have very warm tones. Green and blue are colors that are not naturally found in human skin colors. I will let you draw your own conclusions from these facts.
Try to not take overexposed or underexposed photos (AKA photos with a lot of pixels that are pure white or pure black) - you can always make a photo more contrasted after the facts, but if the base photo has zones that are devoid of details to begin with, you won't be able to lower contrast to get them back.
As always, have fun, play around!!