1st time Self-Photo family portrait...Need help

I really appreciate if you guys can give me your opinion on my photos (i.e. good take??, setting?, placement?) and suggestion as to where can I read up more (in POTN forum) on improving the image quality before I print it out.

I recently purchased a 70D and thought it was a great camera to try to do a family portrait by myself. (True to be told, it is very difficult to get my wife and kids to cooperate )
Anyway, I need some suggestion on the following:

1) Did I do a half decent job in getting the basic in the image ( color, lighting, and focus)

2) I took the image in both RAW and Jpeg. And I also have the Lastolite White balance screen in the photo to help me do the white balance. BUT....
I never truly understand the method of using the screen. Do I use the Grey scale side or the white color side? And how do I do it? [I've installed the CD Rom DPP and purchased the LR5]

3) There is a guy in the background just about to get on his bike....Given my applications that I have, can I cover/ or mass/ him &bike out of the photo?

4) And if there is/are more pointers that you can offer me to improve my skills, I'm truly grateful. I might not able to take another shot for this year but at least I can improve on my skill so my family doesn't have to seat for an hour to take another family portrait in the near future....lol

NOTE: I know your time are very valuable so if you don't have time to explain on here, I would really appreciate you direct me to a link or a specific page on this forum discussion so I can do my homework easier. MUCH appreciate.

Sincerely,
Gary

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …45859410@N04/11​393999415/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …45859410@N04/11​394061044/

Gary --

I read this on one of the photography blogs, and I know it was somewhat "tongue in cheek", but there is a lot of truth to it.

Three steps to a good photograph:
1. Find good light.
2. Find a good background.
3. Put your subject in the scene.

So, you have a wonderful subject here, and you've placed them in soft, diffused light, but your background is busy, distracting, and brighter than your subject. No problem, Lightroom will take care of that. (Not saying it wouldn't be better to reshoot with better exposure on the family and a darker, simpler background, but there's a lot you can do with this image.) I would suggest doing some serious cropping to put the emphasis where you want it (on the people). After that I adjusted Shadows and Contrast a bit, then carefully brushed all around the family to lower highlights and exposure just a bit. If you detect a little halo anywhere it's because I didn't take enough care since I was just trying to create a quick example. After that I still didn't like the balance between foreground and background, so I pulled a Graduated Filter all the way across the entire image (so it's no longer "graduated" -- easy to do, difficult to explain) to open the shadows and increase contrast just a bit more. I also applied a bit of a vignette. I think this is moving in the right direction. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about portrait photography!)

(Some green fringing in the upper right corner. LR should be able to correct that in the RAW file.)

Edit: Hmmm, the more I look at this the more I see. A little work with targeted Saturation and LUminance will tone down those bright yellow leaves in the background. Edit-Edit: I'm amazed at what LR could pull out of the full sized JPG file from Flickr -- note how much detail has been recovered in the hair and the little girl's jacket (although the bright areas in the trees are starting to look pretty flat). You should be able to get very good results with the RAW file.

I am 100% with Rimmer on this one. You did a really good shot other than the background. The family is generally smiling and that is actually really tough.
Your white balance looks to me. With the applications you have, the masking might be a little tough if you want to clone out some of the clutter in the background. If you are in a position to buy another piece of software, you can get Photoshop Elements for reasonably cheaply. I myself use Gimp for Cloning out stuff like that and it is free. But it has a pretty steep learning curve.
Just keep practicing, it will make you a better photographer, because we are all looking for the best shot we can and if we look at our previous work, we can usually find things that we can try to better next time.

Ron

Thanks for the encouraging words Ron and Ace.
I tried to open the aperture on the earlier shots but thought the background display was too busy. My wife and I didn't like the mosaic kinda of appearance. So I decided to step up the aperture to 6.3 or higher. Here is the earlier test shot.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …45859410@N04/11​395549066/

I wouldn't have chosen a situation where the background was brighter than the people in the foreground. You really needed to light your family to bring them up a stop or two, or choose a less busy, darker background. I'd also have used more like F4 or F5.6 to blur the background, 6.3 is stopped down quite a bit.