Photoshop Workflow: How to make a Modeling/Portrait Photo Truly High Key

Check out my speed up photoshop workflow on a photo I shot for PPW wrestlers a few months ago.

Note the video is not from start to finish as it was my first time in a very long time using the capture software so I forgot I was not recording (I know), so its in bites and pieces which ended being a 1 hour 44 minutes+ edit! And then compressed it into a 12+ minute video at the fastest speed I could make it. Plus my computer crashed right after saving the file, and starting up the video capture again as the video capture took way too much of my CPU

After watching that I basically did some masking and filled in the background with solid clean white as my seamless was a bit too small for tag team wrestlers (2 subjects), so I shot it anyways even though I generally don't and would always aim to get perfect shot in-camera, sadly it was not possible as it was on-location before an actual PPW show and bringing only a small seamless than the very large, which I cannot travel with as it is much bigger than my car! 

Other than the white-ing the background I did simple cleaning on the wardrobe and skin with the healing brush mostly. 

Lighting setup was 2 medium softboxes on left and right of subjects and 1 Lastolite Ez Box as the key light

Sample Photos of Lastolite EZY Box Large Softbox (30x30)

*The following sample photos are Straight out of Camera, totally untouched/edited, these are purely sample photos to show how the softbox looks with and without. LEFT is without flash, the RIGHT is with the flash on.

Shutter: 1/160th
Aperture: f/7.1
ISO: 200
Lens: Canon 24-70 2.8L
Camera Body: Canon 6D

Lastolite Hot Shoe EZYBOX Softbox Kit-30 x 30"

Side note of my experience with using hotshoe softboxes in the field, its ok, as long as you got someone holding the lightstand(s) or good weights to hold them down. I don't have weights right now other than normal sandbags I may start using since assitants are so hard to come by in my area. Other than that I would have loved more power but the only option for more power is studio strobe or investing into a $500+ speedlight (600EX) as I was using YN560 here at 90% power. I may invest into more studio strobes and battery packs to shoot more environmentals instead of speedlights, primarily cost savings is a big difference. Once I could afford into more speedlights then I'll go into a heavy speedlight setups for obvious reasons.