From my 4 (?) years of shooting, the majority of the portraits I've taken were done in 5-10 minutes. I've only had a handful of proper shoots, and even those there were no props, backdrops etc. Soon enough, I got bored with the content I was creating and had to find a way to make the portraits somewhat interesting to me, and the easiest way was by editing.

I'm going to give a few tips on how to edit + salvage images, and provide some resources and (hopefully) inspiration for photos.

NOTE
I released two tutorials prior to this which might be helpful and I suggest taking a look at those before reading this one since I'll be discussing techniques I covered in those already.

RESOURCES

WHAT YOU NEED

Photoshop
Lightroom
Resources (find your own as well!)

TIP NO. 1 / NOT ALL OUT OF FOCUS PHOTOS ARE UNSALVAGEABLE

The norm in photography is that a good photo is sharp, intriguing, and most importantly, in focus. But sometimes our cameras freak out and we lose a shot that could have been really cool. What I've been doing is simply editing them as if they were taken on film because let's be honest, I edit as if all my photos were taken on film. The difference here is I add more grain and some texture to it, I just exaggerate everything.

Making a photo look like film is fairly easy. Reduce the clarity, bump the sharpness, add a lot of grain and mute the highlights. Maybe add some fade in the curves, I didn't do it for this image though.

DANNY BROWN

I added two sheets of different types of dust and scratches

TIP NO. 2 / 5 MINUTE SHOOTS DON'T HAVE TO BE SIMPLE

Ok this isn't a tip but for the sake of consistency I'm keeping it as a "tip." As I said before, I grew bored with my portraits until I started messing around with textures. Below is a free preset for you to use a base if you'd like. I'm not going to lie, releasing my presets is nerve wrecking because I want these edits to determine my style and help me stand out and giving that away obviously takes away from that. Nonetheless, I hope these are of some help to you and I hope you tweak them enough to your liking. I can't stress that enough. These should be used as a base, a starting point so that you can create something yourself!

To get the free preset simply put your email below, you have the option to confirm the subscription in your email (I promise to only spam you with these tutorials and dog photos) but I'm going to try to release tutorials every week on various topics and by subscribing you'll get it right to your inbox.