Candid Portrait

[USER876]

I captured this as a very quick candid. What can be done to improve it...pp or anything. it is a tight crop so I have some room to play with regarding placement.

[tonydee]

Perhaps also post the uncropped version so we can see the options. I think the main opportunity is in darkening the background... I'd take a try it and see approach. Up to you whether you want to go the glam look route. A smidge more sparkle in the eyes would be kind of gratifying, but then the paleness suits the current background. Cheers, Tony

[Flo]

I am seeing a blue green tint to the photo? I tried to adjust the colors.lol.but now she is a redhead:confused:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v299/emmaloudawg/_LR2_FINAL-2253-21.jpgCrop and slight sharpen

[Robert_Lay]

The sun seems to be very high - perhaps very nearly directly above and a little to our right but partly obscured by overcast or clouds.

It also seems that there might be some fill light from either flash or a reflector being used to soften the shadows.

I'm also guessing that it is a partly overcast or partly sunny day - otherwise the contrast would be much worse (since it does not look to me like Open Shade).

The result is a not very contrasty image but with a confusing set of facial shadows.

In conclusion, I would say that in an attempt to control the lighting, the result is one of confusion, primarily because you went overboard in trying to even lighting all over the face, which is un-natural and too flat.

Try Quality of Light (http://www.zaffora.com/W9DMK/QualityOfLight.mht)

[CJinAustin]

Hard shot to fix pp.... the background is a strange hue so I'd probably just desaturate and the rest would be the normal pp skin and wrinkle stuff... whatever she wants...

[rsagusti]

the shot is super cool lots of blues and greens. Your having some color / white balance issues which I would try to eliminate in camera before taking the shot. Use a CWB and shoot in RAW if you don't yet. Both are super easy and don't take much time at all, maybe 5 seconds for a CWB and RAW is nothing but awesome.

Not really sure why your background is so wonky color wise, I may play a little with it. And see if I can do anything with it.

[rsagusti]

ok here is my play, I only did color correction, no skin smoothing or anything cosmetic.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3602/3472703486_69d77ea2c4_o.jpg

I just did a quick fix, nothing to tedious.

I opened in ACR as a JPEG-RAW file. Tweaked a lot the exposure then the white balance added some fill light and vibrance, along with some sharpening in ACR.

Then I opened in PSE6 and tweaked levels, then used a free curves filter and tweaked that a lot for the contrast. Then I erased back her skin and warmed that up a little.

Like I said just did a quick play.

[USER876]

Another from the set....

[rsagusti]

oh and I should add, i tend to like brighter pictures, but there was a spot on the right side of her forehead that was blown in the original, and there wasn't much I could do to recover it.

[rsagusti]

yes I like the second pose a lot better. The first shot was kind of weak all around because she didn't have that great of posture.