First try at PP, critique please

[madmike283]

First off, I posted this in the post-processing forum but haven't gotten any feedback yet. Thought I'd post it here too.

Hey all, I have only had my 10D for a few weeks and have shot a handful of different kinds of images. NASCAR race in Charlotte, Memorial Day BBQ, and yesterday shot some pics of my wife at the beach and our friend's house. This is the first image that I've tried a full fledged post-processing flow. I believe I have managed to save the image at a small enough size with decent detail to post it here. If you wouldn't mind giving me your thoughts on my PP changes I'd appreciate it. My monitor won't quite adjust dark enough to display pure black, so I will be fixing that soon. Does this image look ok to you guys? I'd appreciate some cc and feel free to make any changes. Thanks.

Mike

[MCB]

I like it. There's nothing glaringly obvious that jumps out and screams "newbie! newbie!" at me. :lol: But it might be helpful (for me anyway) to also see the original.

[madmike283]

I believe this is the original right from the camera. This ACR with CS2 adds auto adjustments right away when you open an image as far as I can tell, but I believe I've got that turned off now and was able to revert back to the RAW straight from the camera. It was saved to .tif, then resized and saved as .jpeg for posting here.

[Hellashot]

I think you brightened it too much. There is much better color tone in the original. What you adjusted makes it look like a big flash too close to her. You only needed to lighten the shadows slightly. Try doing it again but with much less amounts.

[madmike283]

I think you brightened it too much. There is much better color tone in the original. What you adjusted makes it look like a big flash too close to her. You only needed to lighten the shadows slightly. Try doing it again but with much less amounts.

Now that I look at both versions together I can see it. I was worried since my monitor won't adjust dark enough. I still have to play with, and learn the differences between adjusting the Exposure level and Brightness level in ACR. Thanks for the comments so far!

EDIT: I took another crack at it, starting from the Raw file again. Thoughts on this last one? Better, worse?

[madmike283]

bump

[hollow]

easy, easy madmike ! ;)

I'll post my try (hope you don't mind). And this is what I've done :
- Adjusted shaddows/hilights;
- Adjusted a little levels;
- Desaturate about 5% red channel;
- Created another layer based on backgournd layer; changed blending mode to screen; changed opacity to acout 10%;
- Flaten image;
- Run Unsharp Mask bout 45%.

All done in Photoshop.

It would be better I guess to use the flash as a fill light to eliminate the shaddow under the nose.

Regards