Hand ins for the last camera club competition of the season are tonight and when I woke this morning I only had one image (a wildlife picture of a badger cub) to enter instead of the requisite two.

So I decided I’d re-edit a self portrait that I took a couple of years ago which I’ve never been happy with and submit that, thinking it would only take an hour. How wrong can you be! I’ve spent 5½ frustrating hours trying to get this picture right and it’s driven me insane.

The reason for most of the frustration is The Enemy of all photographers – noise.

When I started doing portrait photography and could control my light sources and therefore my ISO I thought tackling noise would be a thing of the past. I wish! Portraits need to contain both light and shadow and shadow is where noise lurks.

When I do studio portraiture I tend to concentrate on the highlights, so they are not blown out, and forget about the shadows, dealing with them afterwards in Photoshop. I usually have to lift the shadows otherwise they just look like black blobs of nothingness, but when you lighten the dark areas they inevitably contain noise, which then has to be blurred to make it less visible. But that then softens the picture, so you have to sharpen which re-introduces noise. And so the dance goes on until a compromise is found, which I’m invariably not happy with!

The other issue I’ve found lurking in the shadows of my portraits is the colour green. For some reason the shadows take on a green tinge, which I also have to get rid of in Photoshop otherwise my models end up looking like they’re sickening for something. You’d think it would be easy to get rid of the green by just adding a hue/saturation layer, going into the yellow channel and taking the saturation down. And, admittedly, this does get rid of the green but it also makes the shadows grey which makes the model look like they’re on the verge of death. What I need is a nice, healthy, pinkish shadow but they seem very hard to come by.

I’ve spent the afternoon tweaking, softening, adding texture, reducing colour, adding other colours and generally faffing about until I could faff no more. The judge will make of the picture what he or she will, because I’ve lost the will to spend another second on it!