tion by softening or eliminating lines that lead outside of the frame. Vignettes
aren’t used on every image, but they give a finished look to most of our high-
and low-keys portraits.
To add a vignette, we simply make an oval shaped selection over the subject
with the Marquee tool, which has its Feather setting at 250 pixels. Then, right
mouse click over the selected area and click on Select Inverse. At this point,
you can darken the selected area for lower-key images or blur the area for high-
key images as you see fit.
Clients Pay for Other Corrections.These simple procedures are all that 99
percent of our images need—but there are times when a client has a specific
problem that couldn’t be corrected in the camera room. If that is the case, the
client pays for the correction. For example, if someone doesn’t like the glare on
their eyeglasses (they insisted on wearing them even after you explained several
times that there would be glare), that client is billed for the correction.
Prevent Copying.
The next—and last—two steps in the processing of the order are probably the
most important from a profit standpoint. In this digital age, where every home
has a decent computer and either a flatbed scanner or a printer with a decent
scanner built into it, copying of our work is a serious problem. Today, younger
people are accustomed to not paying for copyrighted products (music, for ex-
ample), but even more upscale older clients who would have never have thought
of copying your work ten years ago now see copying as a way to save money.
To ensure your business is successful, you must stop your clients from copying
your images.
To accomplish this, we do three things—and if you do them, you will save
the cost of this book hundreds if not thousands of times over.
Add Your Logo.The first thing you must do is to create a logo that goes
on each and every image that leaves your studio. We designed ours to be almost
transparent, similar to the watermark on images you see on the web. The idea
is to have your studio name on the front of each image, so when a client takes
one of your prints to a lab—say at Target or Kinko’s—to make more copies, the
more reputable business will see the logo and not violate the copyright laws by
duplicating it. That being said, you don’t want the logo to betooprominent or
it will look as though you are blatantly advertising across the front of your
clients’ portraits. It should be very subtle, so you really don’t notice it just look-
ing at the portrait.
Be prepared: when you first do this, some clients will complain—but those
will typically be clients that have taken your work to Kinko’s and been sent
away; no client has ever complained about our logo at the time they picked
their order up at the studio. When a client does complain about the logo, we
explain that practically every product you buy has a logo on it—from clothing
120 JEFF SMITH’S GUIDE TO HEAD AND SHOULDERS PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHYYou must stop your
clients from copying
your images.