Help sprucing up a plain white background in Photoshop

Took portraits of friend's family yesterday, and all we had to work with was a plain white wall. So, does anyone have any suggestions for taking these relatively boring photos, and making them feel a bit more creative?

I encourage (and appreciate) examples through shopping

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do you have PS, or Camera Raw, Lightroom?

I'm mobile now but will comment.

A. A little saturated for me. Perhaps you were on the standard picture style, I prefer the faithful.
So desaturate a bit , perhaps only on the reds for the top one if you have Adobe Camera RAW availible to you. Use fill flash in CR or just the center slider in the histogram adjustment in you program to brighten that top face up, if it wasn't so saturated I'd also try a color dodge on the eye sockets.

ALso black and white with a bit of a curves boost would look nice on these, and one may think B&W?? Crazy? Nope. Looks nice.

Throw in an intentional lens vignetting also.

Crop in on the top one to edit out the "crotch cover" gesture.

Then go ahead an put that top one on an angle.

Crop the bottom one in tighter horizontally, nice pose.


Finish by throwing a "glow" or skin softening action on both.

I have CS4.

Yea, you're definitely right about the red... and the brightening up.

Thanks, I'll do that and repost in a bit.

Try b/w or sepia. It may look quite good.

Edits:

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HOw something like this....

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This simple version.

Mark1 wrote in post #6832004
HOw something like this....

As crazy as that is, it's pretty cool. I intend to run a bunch of ideas by them when we plan out prints, see what they prefer.

Visual Bride wrote in post #6832080
This simple version.

That was using lighting effects?

I like this for the second one:

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That looks pretty good to me

here's another edit

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While this might be a bit late here is an awesome video showing what you can do with a white seamless/wall picture

http://www.zarias.com/​?p=201

It shows how you can clean up shadows on the background and make everything pure white so that you can drop in nice colored gradient backgrounds. Zack Arias is the man for the simple white seamless photos and post.

korsan wrote in post #6844928
While this might be a bit late here is an awesome video showing what you can do with a white seamless/wall picture

http://www.zarias.com/​?p=201

It shows how you can clean up shadows on the background and make everything pure white so that you can drop in nice colored gradient backgrounds. Zack Arias is the man for the simple white seamless photos and post.

It's certainly not late, thank you, I'm going to sit down with them to choose the images they like after xmas, so lots of time remaining

coopergirl wrote in post #6839209
here's another edit

Really like that one.