Post processing of a picture, please comment

[tofuboy]

This picture http://www.tofuboy.net/upload/photos/100_3664_resized.jpg was taken by Lunar Essence (on this forum), and with her permission I tried my hand at a little post processing.

Camera: Kodak DX 6440 P&S 5mp
Shutter: 1/128 s
Aperture: F/4.8
Focal Length: 22mm

Here is my finished version: http://www.tofuboy.net/upload/photos/100_3664_2_resized.jpg

The steps I took were:
1. Adjust Levels
2. Adjust Color Balance
3. 'Gaussian Blur Overlay' as described in a tutorial on www.luminous-landscape.com
4. A tiny touch of unsharp mask

Please comment on how it turned out, what else I could have done or what I shouldn't have done. Thanks.

[Lunar Essence]

Quite a bit of an improvement on the original.. :D Thanks for editing it... I was too lazy to do it myself.. :oops:

[Scottes]

Overall an excellent job, except that the shadows were overdone. You lost some detail in her hair - the original shows a lot of detail and individual hairs, but the processed image has much of that gone to black.

[maderito]

Do you know what color space was selected in the camera? The DX6440 apparently allows Adobe RGB color space image captures (as well as other color spaces). The original image looks beautiful when assigned to Adobe RGB color profile in Photoshop and requires almost no further color editing. It would have to be converted to sRGB to view it on the web.

[tofuboy]

Do you know what color space was selected in the camera? The DX6440 apparently allows Adobe RGB color space image captures (as well as other color spaces). The original image looks beautiful when assigned to Adobe RGB color profile in Photoshop and requires almost no further color editing. It would have to be converted to sRGB to view it on the web.

I see what you mean when changing it to Adobe RGB. Looking at the exif data from the original picture though says it was taken in sRGB *shrugs* I need practice and critiques anyways :)

[maderito]

I agree with Scottes on the loss of shadow details. The young woman's hair is beautiful and at least some of its tonal range should be retained.

I think the original image mainly needs a saturation boost, which can be achieved in a variety of ways - some better than others.

For this particular image, Fred Miranda's "Digital Velvia" does a great job. http://www.fredmiranda.com/shopping/DV . It costs $15 and is money well spent if you are going to be doing a lot of photo editing. With the DV action, you can increase (or decrease) saturation to varying degrees while maintaining good color balance and contrast. Velvia refers to one of the all time favorite camera films - Fujichrome Velvia. (BTW - I'm not connected with F. Miranda - or Fuji :) )

Finally, if you are using Photoshop CS, after you have the color and contrast adjusted, try improving shadow detail with the Shadow/Highlights adjustment (try shadows: amount 15, tonal width 15, radius 30).

Nice pic!!