Here's on of the photos, which I will use to walk through my process:
EXIF Data
Shutter speed: 1/100s
Aperture: F9.0
Focal length: 19mm
ISO:200
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm
This is lit with three lights - one in a 24x24 softbox, just over the camera, and two shoot-through umbrellas on either side. Lights are at 1/4 power, if I remember correctly.
The first problem I ran into was the size of my backdrop - just not big enough - so I knew that I would have to do some post-processing to fix that. A formal family portrait just doesn't work with kids toys (mine, not theirs) strewn around in the background.
I tweaked a couple of things in Lightroom (exposure) and then sent it over to Photoshop. In there I duplicated the layer so it was two duplicates on top of one another. In the lower layer I used a large paintbrush to paint a white background, overlapping the subjects in the image. Back in the top layer, I used the quick select to outline the subjects, zooming in to refine it, and set that as the layer mask.
One of the great things about Photoshop is the "refine edge" mask - you can "paint" certain areas (like hair) and it will refine the mask in those areas to pick up stray hairs and make the mask look very nice; you end up with very natural-looking edges.
With that done, I finally had a white backdrop for my subjects. While I had a fair-looking edge around my subjects, there were some parts that were not that great. I decided to use a very fuzzy brush to paint around some of those areas; since I had overlapped my big white brush to make the backdrop, I would be partially revealing a white background - essentially making that edge look somewhat blow out. As I did this, it found that it looked like I had lit my subjects with harsh, bright light. When I sent the image back to Lightroom, I bumped the clarity up quite a bit to really bring out the details. The end product is almost like I ran it through a high-pass filter.
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