Looking for crop/processing advice - Baby Candid!

this is what i came up with, followed with the original. i really struggled with the crop - i really liked his pose, but the face was so precious i wanted to crop in on it. thoughts?

That is really cute and I think you got the post process exactly right. I would clone out those two things marring the background wall but that is it.

thanks for the suggestion, will do. i think that should be within my photoshop abilities since the bg isn't very busy.

this was one of the first photos where i adjusted the white balance and tint just by eye and didn't use the white balance dropper thing - i'm glad at least one person thinks that i did an okay job with the color.

The lighting is too flat - is that a flash image?

In the second shot the color balance looks too yellow.

the second shot is the same shop, unprocessed. i was bouncing flash of the ceiling taking horizontal shots, then i turned the camera vertical, so the flash would have bounced to the left.

the horizontal shots i took had similar WB to the proccessed shot above, while the vertical shots bounced left turned out yellowish.

maybe i will see if i can bring the shadows down a bit in curves to bring a bit more dimension to his face.

Moooney wrote in post #8817740
maybe i will see if i can bring the shadows down a bit in curves to bring a bit more dimension to his face.

These pictures both have similar histograms which show that the pictures are characterized by a rather limited range of tonalities. In other words, most of the pixels lie in the middle tones - this is more true for the second picture than for the first.

I think you will find, if you try it, that you will not be able to do much to improve the pictures with either the Curves tool or the Levels tool.

The basic problem here, as is the case with most flash photography, is that the brightness of the shadows relative to the highlights is not so much the problem as is the length of the shadows.

In order to accentuate or develop the facial contours, the lighting should be at such angles above and to one side of the subject as to obtain medium length shadows running diagonally across the face. These can be softened, as necessary, with the flat lighting from the flash, but the key light should be placed so as to get the necessary modeling.