Another shot - how do I...

[Amamba]

Another shot from NY. How do I make it more vibrant without blowing away skin colors and making it look unnatural ? Also, trim / crop suggestions welcome. I did try vertical crop but didn't like the results.

394455


And the original shot from DPP screen:

394457

[joedlh]

The original looks overexposed to me. In addition, it looks like you blasted her with fill flash. You might try dropping exposure control on the fill flash by 1/2 to a full stop. She looks like a deer in the headlights. You've got two sources of light: the cloudy sky, which will be bluish, and the flash which will be at 6000 K. Dropping the fill flash will let the sky prevail. You can then white balance that, which will give her warmer skin tones. The flash also flattens her features by eliminating natural shadows.

[technodunce]

I am by no means an expert but this is what I see in this picture.

Actually i don't dislike it. But it does almost look like two pictures. The background looks bluish and the girl looks pinkish. Can you get them a little more in synch.

What sort of vibrant do you want? Can you be more specific because its not dull?

She does look a little cold (chilled)

I don't know if this would help but in photoshop elements under enhance, there is a colour replace thingy. I wonder if that would help. Once i made brown grass green and it looked very natural. I was totally surprised by it. So I wonder if you changed the colour of her jacket if that would help. I don't think jacket is good against the blue background. Also the clouds seem a little too blue can you neutralise them a little.

[Amamba]

I am by no means an expert but this is what I see in this picture.

Actually i don't dislike it. But it does almost look like two pictures. The background looks bluish and the girl looks pinkish. Can you get them a little more in synch.

What sort of vibrant do you want? Can you be more specific because its not dull?

She does look a little cold (chilled)

I don't know if this would help but in photoshop elements under enhance, there is a colour replace thingy. I wonder if that would help. Once i made brown grass green and it looked very natural. I was totally surprised by it. So I wonder if you changed the colour of her jacket if that would help. I don't think jacket is good against the blue background. Also the clouds seem a little too blue can you neutralise them a little.

Is this more "in sync" ?

394588

[technodunce]

I think so. I guess its better if you can see them side by side. Does it look better to you? Have you cropped too much out of the sky now. I'd say put it back. I have not got an expert eye on these things. Generally when I've got an original and a corrected I can see easily which is better.

[thebeatnut]

Just be careful how you edit as your subject now has a light 'halo' around her hair which looks unnatural. For future reference when photographing in low light (and i'll happily be corrected on this!!!), it is useful to expose for the background then light the subject to bring them up to the correct exposure. This certainly helps when the background is too light and blown out.

[gking]

I like the post-production change to the model's skin, bringing her beautiful eyes color.
I do notice the halo as well. The choice of jacket did not help since it is a color that does not gives good contrast with the water. I bet a little smile would make it better.

[Amamba]

I like the post-production change to the model's skin, bringing her beautiful eyes color.
I do notice the halo as well. The choice of jacket did not help since it is a color that does not gives good contrast with the water. I bet a little smile would make it better.

The "model" hates being photographed, so I usually have about 3 clicks until the "lack of smile" turns into a look of annoyance (unless I take candid shots).

The halo should be fairly easy to remove via adjustment layers, I'll try that later...

[gking]

Maybe she needs to be told she is a beautiful woman and her smile would help to brighten the scene... but I understand the situation.

[jetcode]

Flat light is flat light. A reflector to one side would have given some level of depth to the subjects face. This would require an assistant. Another choice is to use flash offset to the left or right.

[IanBMW]

I agree with others, may want to rework how you do the lighting from the flash.

[technodunce]

If you can't use a reflector or off camera flash, why not just just lower the intensity of the fill flash? Would that be acceptable?

I thought her expression was nice. Now when I don't smile, I really look bad in a picture so I basically have to smile.

[Bill Boehme]

Any better? Tough lighting situation for correcting in PP.

395132

[Flo]

Bill, thats pretty dark?

She is just beautiful!

Tried a 16X9 HD crop.....set her off center.level the BG.and some tonal contrast...
http://macymae.smugmug.com/photos/657729237_dhamS-L.jpg

[technodunce]

Bill I sometimes have similar problems deciding just where is too light or too dark. Judging this stuff is not easy I find. I wonder if it would help to have a magazine picture beside you to compare with. Something from a glossy.

Its good you've lost the halo.

[cadred]

Here's my take. Basically you are trading exposure for saturation. The main thing I did was make a copy of the layer and set it to Multiply mode, this will emphasize the shadows, but more importantly bring down the overall exposure and increase saturation. Overall this worked pretty well, but I wanted to be more specific so I added some layer masks to lighten the effect in the background a bit.

That looked pretty good, but I had 2 issues I wanted to fix. First I lost the detail in her hair because of the Multiply. To fix this I ran Shadows/Highlights with the default settings on the original layer.

The last issue was the color temp difference between the warmer tones on your subject and the cooler/cloudy tones of the background. I converted to LAB mode for this (mostly because I know few tricks here). I clipped the top and bottom of both A and B channels to 100/-100, which adds an overall saturation bump, and then bumped the upper mid-tones of the A channel a smidge to add some magenta, and slightly increased the steepness of the B channel to add an overall warmth. Since your model already had nice warm skin tone, I added a layer mask to mask her out.

It probably took longer to write this than to actually do it :)

Obviously, having the raw file would give you a lot more latitude for corrections.

Edit: Looking at it now in the browser, it's probably a bit over saturated, but that's easy to fix.

[Bill Boehme]

Bill, thats pretty dark?

On my monitor it looks somewhat darker than I would like, but that is the only route to increasing dynamic range in a overexposed linage with very little tonal range. On my wide gamut monitor, there is still plenty of unused range on the dark end, but different monitors don't all have the same display capabilities and also may be calibrated differently (or, in some cases, not calibrated at all), so what you see may look very different.

Bill I sometimes have similar problems deciding just where is too light or too dark.

I knew that my edit would be darker before I started because that is the penalty for increasing dynamic range of an overexposed flat lighting image. The question then becomes, " how far to go with it".

Here's my take. Basically you are trading exposure for saturation......

The last issue was the color temp difference between the warmer tones on your subject and the cooler/cloudy tones of the background.

I agree with both of your points. It was fairly easy to figure out that the color of the subject lighting was different than the background lighting so my editing solution was to create separate layers for both and white balance them separately. The large amount of JPG compression did not lend itself well to editing -- picket fencing in the histogram became evident with very little tonal adjustment.

[rw2]

Here is my try.

[Amamba]

The last two look very dark, although my monitor isn't calibrated...

[rw2]

The last two look very dark, although my monitor isn't calibrated...
My monitor is calibrated. I would appreciate knowing if others find my edit very dark. Maybe I need a different calibration system.

[technodunce]

Cadred that looks terrible on my computer. I mean really wrong.

RW2 I think yours doesn't look too dark to me.

The one I like the best so far is Flo's. I think taking some intensity out of the background helps and possibly also setting the girl to left of centre. If you are going to move the girl around (which is not a bad idea at all compositionally, I think i'd try moving her to the right and a bit further over to the right but I am not positive about that.

It occurs to me that making the back ground lighter is key to making this work. I like the crop in RW2 and the girl looks fine. I think the blurriness is a bad idea. It never looks real. Or at least whenever I know i've seen it, then clearly its not natural if you know what i mean.

[bfree32]

Brightness looks fine to me rw2, but the background blur looks overdone and unnatural to me.

[Bill Boehme]

My monitor is calibrated. I would appreciate knowing if others find my edit very dark. Maybe I need a different calibration system.

It looks fine on my calibrated monitor except that the background seems to have too much of a cyan cast. I agree with the other comment about lightening and desaturating the background would be the best approach. I like the background in Flo's edit, but the subject seems too light to me. The subject lighting makes editing somewhat difficult.

[vpnd]

When you have full on flash blasted to the face, it gives a one demensional quality to a subject. This is not a good quality to have. It is nearly impossible to remove. I would say to start by practicing a certain distance away and getting the flash to be consistant from that distance. For example 12 feet. Once you know that the flash will produce consistant light you can dial more light for father distances, and less for closer. It just takes practice.

[Amamba]

As far as brightness goes, my 2nd edit (post #4) looks near perfect to me, maybe a tad on the darker side of perfect. In Flo's edit, the overall brightness is a bit up, still looks OK, but the skin on the nose, chin and cheekbones all looks a bit too shiny. This is just the brightness, I am not talking colors.

[CJinAustin]

Here's my interpretation
Contrast +10
Made new Multiply layer at 40% opacity
Masked off girl so background is darker
Original Layer saturation -15
Original layer +10 more contrast -10 brightness.
Cropped
curves original layer 121, 135
unsharp mask
(edit changed border to grey)

Original: http://photography-on-the.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=394457&d=1253368727

[Binning]

Here's another shot at it. I focused primarily on the skin tone, trying to get the right mix of CMY. The original shot had almost no cyan in the skin. I don't know if I accomplished it very well, but I thought I would give it a shot. I've added an overall curves adjustment to add contrast and played with the background a little adding some saturation of the buildings (which one can take or leave depending on taste) And finally I added a smart sharpen to the body. I didn't make any beauty edits and was careful not to lose the highlights in her eyes. Hope this helps. Tim

Edit: interesting when I saved it from PS it added contrast which put it over the top

[JVS]

From see all these adjustments... Binning's adjustment is the better one.

[technodunce]

I really like the crop in cjin austin but that border has to go. Its so overpowering. Its all i can see. I'd suggest either a fine black line set outside a space of white or better still, a grey border.

[CJinAustin]

I really like the crop in cjin austin but that border has to go. Its so overpowering. Its all i can see. I'd suggest either a fine black line set outside a space of white or better still, a grey border.

lol,,, fixed...

[korrektor]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v636/korr123/edit.jpg

dodge and burn :)

[kj77263]

Lacks naturalness

[korrektor]

lacks spelling lol

elaborate please