For today’s experiment, I decided to create an extreme high-key photo, starting with a normally-exposed photo, and using Photoshop and Color Efex Pro.

It didn’t take long to figure out the sort of photos that look good in high key (or, especially, the ones that look bad – there were some I tried that were great subject matter for high-key if they had originally been planned that way, but the backgrounds ruined the shots for high key).

Here is the original

You can see that I cropped the photo for the high-key version.  One of the reasons was the arm in the photo – under the high-key treatment, it completely disappeared and so the area under the sleeve was empty and looked awkward.  So one thing I learned is that areas work well where there is something that remains as an edge under high-key – like the headgear surrounding her face, which provides clear separation from the background.

[Model courtesy of the Westcott photo-shoot booth at Photoshop World]