New to DSLR and photography as a whole really...

Maybe Something larger...

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I prefer natural lighting, but in this case the lighting is the big problem. There just isn't any light on your main subject.

Using HDR techniques there is the possibility of opening up the deep shadow on the baby's face withough wiping out the window and vertical blinds. That is the one thing that is properly exposed in this shot. What a shame!

I had a feeling about the lighting comment. Actually, to be honest, most of my shots seem to come out poorly lit, such as the one posted above. Sometimes after a shot, I review it in the viewfinder and seem to think a certain shot looks really good but then when I transfer it over to the computer I notice that I have lighting problems, camera shake, lens flare, etc.

Thanks though for the comment! Any other thoughts? Can this be saved?

What software are you using to process your images?

What metering mode were you using?

The subject is back-lit. You need to compensate for this when taking the picture, either with fill flash, or exposure compensation or metering for the baby's face in the partial or spot modes.

Of course by the time you have done all this the moment will have passed, but don't worry the more you try the quicker you will get.

When I was first starting I would put my xt onto the green square and use it like a point and shoot for this kind of one off moment. The built in flash on the xt and xti works very well in these kind of close fill situations where there is no risk of red eye.

Mike McCusker wrote in post #5039819
What software are you using to process your images?

I use the Digital Photo Professional Program on the Canon Utilities Disc

nwa2 wrote in post #5039889
What metering mode were you using?

I Used evaluative metering mode.

PSCS has this wonderful tool called Shadows/Highlights...

All I had to do was invoke that tool on your image and it automatically gave me this:

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Thanks Robert! Definitely looks better

What program should I be using for PP? Any recomendations?

Bleufire wrote in post #5039680
Sometimes after a shot, I review it in the viewfinder and seem to think a certain shot looks really good but then when I transfer it over to the computer I notice that I have lighting problems, camera shake, lens flare, etc.

You might try reviewing it with the histogram showing, will help to lookup what it means in detail but essentially if theres a large bulge to the far left then its underexposed.

Bleufire wrote in post #5043547
Thanks Robert! Definitely looks better

What program should I be using for PP? Any recomendations?

That's a matter of personal preference. In order to do what I did on your image, I only used the one tool, Shadows/Highlights..., and something like that may be included with PS Elements.

Another little trick, if your PP app supports layers with masks and blending modes, is to create a duplicate of the image on a new layer, set the blending mode to "Screen", play with the opacity of that layer until you get the proper exposure on the faces and paint the original background (drapes) back into a mask with a big soft brush. The GIMP is an open source image editing tool (sort of like Photoshop), it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is free. http://www.gimp.org/

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i thought i would have a go, as i was intrigued by the amount of low light noise in the image (yeah, i know a lot of it was jpg artifacting).

heres the steps i used:

1. copy baby face to new layer and denoise/mosaic
2. manipulate curves on baby face, Unsharp mask 100/.5/0
3. set baby face layer to ‘lighter color’ transfer mode and
4. set baby face layer 80% opacity
5. convert image to 16 bit/RGB
6. tone map original (base) layer --help recover medium shadows and maintain deep shadows
7. paste duplicate of unmodified original file between the 2 modified layers and set to 60% opacity

of course the infants face will degrade with all of the processing, but i tried to counteract that as much as possible without going into manual overpaint tricks (sorry, i just don't have the time )

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Bleufire wrote in post #5039680
I had a feeling about the lighting comment. Actually, to be honest, most of my shots seem to come out poorly lit, such as the one posted above.

The camera's light metering system makes a weighted average of the light using most of the whole frame. In a situation like this where the background is strongly lit, that will be the major influence on the light metering. Same situation in reverse if there is a very large dark background. You can often get around the problem by getting up close to the face of your subject and taking a light reading with the camera. Change to manual mode and set the aperture and shutter speed as determined by that reading.

bill boehme wrote in post #5071525
The camera's light metering system makes a weighted average of the light using most of the whole frame. In a situation like this where the background is strongly lit, that will be the major influence on the light metering. Same situation in reverse if there is a very large dark background. You can often get around the problem by getting up close to the face of your subject and taking a light reading with the camera. Change to manual mode and set the aperture and shutter speed as determined by that reading.

Good advice!
Or....
Meter on the area that is critical by pushing shutter to the half way point while pointing at a middle tone; hold the half shutter while re-composing (pointing for desired framing) and follow through with releasing the shutter. In that way you meter on one part of the picture but return to the place you wanted to point to when you take the picture.