Shooting Portraits Wide Open vs Stopping Down: The Breakdown with Miguel Quiles 

Thought exactly the same. LOL

By exposing more texture, you'll be able to control the sharpness and softness of the entire skin and the entire picture

exactly ahahahaha

That's the problem with everyone today wanting the sharpest lens then go out and decrease the texture in general.

lol rightt

my thoughts exactly!! lol

i love f/5.6 too

Yeah I was like WTH on those final images. Turned her into a cartoon.

💯

Hahaha thats what i thought too

Momchil Yordanov "I like to stop down to get more texture," then retouches to remove all of the texture. Funny way of doing things

@@gilph3 I was going to write the exact same thing

@@gilph3 Yes, I thought the same. The only thing that it's achieved is bringing the background more into focus, which kind of defeats the whole point

Too much time on his hands. Show texture then blur the skin. Next blur skin then show texture. Sounds like a musical 😀

I agree

If shoot a portrait you might not need feet, but it's nice to have some. 😅

@@cubeedoo there is no correlation in what you just said and what he said

@@neneodonkor A man of logic here

I assumed that's what he would have used. Sad get didn't.

John Cantrell looks very basic 😕

Agreed. And I'm not knocking Miguel here but those 2 images look pretty much exactly the same after retouching. You'd be hard pressed to see any real texture difference between the two. The retouching annihilated any texture in the image shot at 5.6 so much that it looks practically identical to the other comparison image. Comparing them to show the difference in skin texture retention was pointless as they both look pretty much the same.

Exactly my thoughts.

Sorry they look exactly the same. In fact side-by-side half the time there were more skin texture retained in the f/1.8 shot. Very confusing.

Yes. The stupid cliche retouching runs away from the goal of the video.

Maybe it is just my 39" monitor, but there is more detail in the skin in the f/5.6 shot; one of the reasons I hardly ever do portraiture completely open. I also viewed at the full 1080p resolution. Additionally, when retouching is done right, the large lines and wrinkles can be reduced, but the fine lines need to remain, so as to not make the skin look like a china doll. Large blemishes can be taken out, but fine lines give skin its unique texture which CGI artists find hard to match. So there is a point to keeping SHARP detail in the skin with an f/5.6 aperture then retouch later.

I shoot portraits at F5 plus or minus that given the situation. And yes, skin is always fine. It is better to have all in proper focus to begin with and soften if you NEED to than to not have the proper focus for various facial aspects to begin with. And yes, if you want more background blur, move away from your background. Shallow depth of focus (wide open aperture) should be used when the shot NEEDS it, not as a lazy way to blow out backgrounds or impress the ignorant with how low an aperture your "expensive lens" has.

Ha, excellent point

Even with backgrounds completely OOF location choices are huge...colors, textures, "type" of bokeh. I shoot head shots wide open and am always scouting for locations.

@@mikecolletta7527 And it still makes no sense to me if nobody can see the background because it just ends up as colored soup. I have no problem with using wide apertures but using them to just get a soupy background with NO hint of the kind of location you're in is just pointless to me. But.....I guess to each their own *shrug*

elr2141979 f4, f4.5 is the sweet spot for most lenses

Agree

If you nail focus on the eye. F1.2. Then the center of the lens of a 85mm f1.2 is perfect and the fall off of the glass on the edges add to the Bokeh. It's why the Canon 85mm f1.2 looks so amazing when done right. If you stop down the clarity of the edges is better. But that defeats the purpose of a portrait lens. Think old days when for portraits photographers put Vaseline on a uv filter around the outside edge. To soften the edges. The Canon 85mm f1.2 was designed to do that look. Bring F stop to f8 it's back to clear. I laugh when people brag on edge to edge clarity stopped down on portrait lenses.

@@mverick160 I mean I think they can launch lenses with an F/8 lens but due to marketing and manufacturing I think people would think to spend only $20 for it so they can't really milk the cost of say an f/4. Damn, before I thought when you buy the more expensive lenses with lower F it lets in More light but a Professional Photographer kept saying how a lower F is bad because of the Depth of Field. I mean why even get a lower F stop for Hundreds more if you aren't even doing Macro?? or is the reason is they shoot Macro but explaining the differences when doing it in Portrait? I was wondering why even shoot at F/36 at Best Buy with the a7 iii! The screen was so dark and I couldn't tell the difference but it's because that's for DOF!

Well, considering that you never saw the background anyway, he could have been in a landfill and we wouldn't have known if we only had the photos to go on lol.

BINGO! And the better the lens, that sweeter that spot is.

Depends on the effect you are after. The effect can depend on the depth of field. Larger aperture (1.4) can give you shallower depth of field which can blur out the back ground more. What is the effect you are going for...it’s a matter of artistic choice.

F-8 and be there, A little flash at 45% and behind subject adds POP

Geist Jäger me when i saw her 💍 please 😍

Shallow depth of focus is a style and IMO a gimmick now days. People see it and think "wow, what a great lens!" but they SHOULD say "wow, what a great portrait". And that shallow depth of focus is used as a selling point, even though IMO the results are less ideal than using somewhere around F5 (give or take depending on the situation). Also for most lenses wide open is NOT the sharpest the lens can produce. So when you START with a lens that is capable of wider open apertures, when stopped down to your USE apertures you get a higher quality image. And THAT is why "we" pay for the wider aperture glass even if we don't SHOOT at those apertures. It just makes me do a face palm when I see the wide open shots. Then again we see too much vignette ADDED to shots as well.... because it looks so "professional", right? No. Those who KNOW realize that vignette is a FLAW not a "quality" in a lens and the shooting process. If used, it should be minimal and not noticeable, as to draw the eye to the subject, not be a "part" of the picture. But I also realize most of us overused vignette in processing when we started out and still cringe when viewing our older work. ;)

Yeh, right, like it happened! Dream on.

it depends on how far the background is from your subject. You can get a blurry background even at f/8 with full body shots if the background is far enough away.

You have confused viewpoint with depth! The depth of focus would be the same in your example! Depth is controlled by circles of confusion, not viewpoint and cropping.

You can't get extra depth of field in post lol.