This lovely tie is extremely strict! Aria's arms are kept to her sides and bound to the waist and crotch rope, which is normal enough. But then her hair was braided in to the ropes and that really meant she couldn't move her upper body. Then we added ropes around her ankles and her waist, so she couldn't straighten out at all either. It put quite some pressure on her, especially as she was kneeling on a hard wooden floor. Of course, Aria took it as a challenge to see how long she could take it- and made it look fantastic in the process! Wowzer!

Hywel's note: if you followed out post-processing tutorial, you'll probably spot that this is the set I used as an example for colour grading. You'll probably also notice that the photos have come out a bit differently from the one I processed on the video. That's kinda typical- when you follow your artistic compass you can come up with different preferred looks on different days. The other reason for subtle colour differences is that I processed these photos in Aperture, as I normally do, rather than Capture One. Different RAW processors can give you subtly or radically different default renderings. It's almost like having different film stock in the camera. If I don't have a strong idea of which was I want a set to look, I'll often load it up in two different RAW processors and decide which one to use as my starting point.

With a bit of work you can almost always get the photo looking like Aperture's default rendering in Capture One, or vice versa. But if you see which way you want to go, it's always easier to start with the closer one. And sometimes I replicate the closer one in the other software package if I know I'm going to want the facilities. So in this case I started off by getting the Aperture rendition close to the Capture One rendition, then fine tuned from there. I knew I was going to want to run a minimal skin smoothing pass and a little bit of retouching (Aria hardly needs any, but she had a bruise on her leg I wanted to reduce).

Basically Aperture rules at skin smoothing and retouching. Capture One rules at detail, coping with high dynamic range, and noise reduction. Phocus (Hasselblad's free retouching) rules at colours for the Hasselblad, and has by far the best keywording interface. Lightroom rules at all-in-one and has some good new stuff like haze reduction in the latest versions. DXO is OK, but I find it tends to an over the top rendering which I rarely choose. It excels at lens optic corrections.