Thank you.

Thing is, I was trying to smile. It's just so hard.

I've been taking these in a corner of my bedroom. I have a tan curtain nailed to the wall. After the shot I remove the background and replace it with something downloaded from photobacks or whatever. First thing I always do is use the darken/lighten center plugin to add a spash of light to the center of the background layer to try to simulate a background light.

One this one I used Color Efex to do a couple of things to my image, but I forgot exactly what I did. I know I used lowkey.... But whatever I did I added control points to my eyes to the effect would not be as strong there. What I ended up with is a lowkey b&w image with brighter, lightly saturated eyes. I then ran an infrared filter to remove the last bit of color.

Hopefully, the effect is not too strong. I was looking for something that would draw you right to my eyes. I've been told that I am a bit intense in my self-portraits. It may be due, in part, to my frustration as I can never seem to get myself full in the frame.

Hey, just for laughs, here is a shot that I took a couple days ago. I used a...different method of PP. I have this one on my desktop at work and most find it to be completly disturbing.

Didn't do too much Saturday. I had silly idea and got my daughter to pose. Other than that.....well I won't stop with the self-portraits until I get it right.
It would be easier if I bought a light stand and an umbrella, I know. But I don't want to buy crap, just because I can afford it.

So, normally I have my flash bouncing off of a reflector with other reflectors acting as fill. For this I tried to at least pretend to do it correctly. I am sitting on a stool with the camera on a tripod, triggered with a remote.
Not having an umbrella, I took a rather large sheet of white art paper and made a large cone.
The flash/cone combo is about 45 degrees(as close as I can tell) from the camera and a bit above my head.
My large reflector is setup on the other side of the camera. Still having an issue completly lighting the other side of my face--I always end up with a black stripe on the side of my nose.

I am sending three shots, one with minimal PP and two with quite a bit more.

As the photographer of this photo I feel I am probably the most efficient person to answer this question for you. I studied photography for 4 years and earned my degree in it and spent years learning how to properly expose, composite, and capture an image to then very carefully digitally re-touch it to achieve my vision. I enjoy the art of enhancing photos and do so on my own to each of my photos. I have created my own recipes blended with other actions and lots of hard work and time is what achieves the look. each photo typically takes me about 5-7 minutes, very time consuming but well worth it to showcase work you are proud of :)

I have found that to best achieve this overexposed soft look, it is best to shoot at golden hour, about an hour before the sun sets. you want to over expose the image by just an f-stop or two before you start to lose detail.
As far as editing, you will want to focus and play with your levels, temps, saturation, and opacity. can't give away all my secrets. best of luck xoxo

Here is one I did with gradients. I had too make two layers and pull the gradient from the top on one and the bottom on the other and I added a mask and painted the bottom of her shoes back in just to show what could be done. I did this quickly and did not try to color inside all of the lines, so to speak just to show you what I was talking about. I hope it helps. I could have chosen a better photo as the blue slide doesn't fit into the scheme.