Austin and Natalie night shoot

my roommate and his girlfriend. they wanted some pictures and i thought since it was a nice night to get some test shots at night to see how some high ISO shots would come out. i think they came out ok but i not a good judge. no post processing other than noise reduction and a filter effect on #2 done in LR3. C&C appreciated

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Well, for starters, they are all very underexposed, but that may be the look you were going for. Also, the first two have a very dull, hazy look to them. This could be fixed in PP by a levels/curves adjustment. The faces also look soft. This could be caused by the high ISO, the noise reduction, missed focus, resizing, or camera shake. It's hard to determine the cause with images this size and no EXIF data to view.

agree they are underexposed. at least a whole stop. try and get some catchlights in your subjects eyes to help make them more...alive. like the guy in the second photo. could help some

I would say start by getting your exposure to where it should be. You lost almost all your detail in your subject by underexposing them...trying to create a dark, moody scene requires contrasty, dramatic light which these are sort of lacking. The soft effect of whatever filter you ran it through only worsened the effect...its one that is suited more towards those dreamy, overexposed shots. Here, they only give a washed out, missed focus look...you need more sharpness, more edge, more contrast.

They arent bad images by any means...but a little more creative post processing would do them a world of good!

yea im trying to learn to process better. my biggest problem was lack of anything other than natural lighting and the detail lost due to noise reduction. i dont know how to keep the pictures sharp after removing noise. i was able to brighten them up more but they are still soft no matter what.

Brian_R wrote in post #11090434
yea im trying to learn to process better. my biggest problem was lack of anything other than natural lighting and the detail lost due to noise reduction. i dont know how to keep the pictures sharp after removing noise. i was able to brighten them up more but they are still soft no matter what.

I cant see your exif data so im not really sure how high of an ISO you were using. Either way, I tend to avoid noise reduction...either in camera or software as it degrades detail. Find the highest ISO your camera can deliver clean, mostly noise free shots and dont exceed it....there are always other work arounds.

Nailing your exposure perfectly is a good way of ensuring even very high ISO shots will be fairly noise free...though, in this case, with the very poor lighting, I dont think that would have helped much. Using a tripod, a lower ISO and a slower shutter speed while having the subjects remain absolutely still is one option. Or using off camera lighting.