My first portrait

Grumpy_one · February 23, 2009

Did these in my family room, I would like some C&C on the pp.
I do plan to do a border and hide the shadow of the stand, I'm working on skin tones. Thanks

This is before pp

After pp. I might experiment to brighten shadow on the side of my daughter's face. It took enough work just to get a good workflow to this point. All C&C welcome, thanks

edit: now that I've taken some time away from the these photo's and revisited them, I would crop tighter on the right side as well.

clemensphoto's · February 24, 2009

The second photo is much better. Great first try.

Shima · February 24, 2009

clemensphoto's wrote:

The second photo is much better. Great first try.

I agree, great work on your first portrait attempt, and good to see you knew what needed brightening in your PP.

Scott_Quier · February 24, 2009

I was looking at the first photo before I finished reading the introduction and was getting ready to comment on how under-exposed the shot was.

Then I saw the "before PP" :lol

The processed one is so much better. It looks like you did a pretty good job with the skin tones.

A couple of hints to make life easier

:

Get the exposure right in camera. With portraits, it's usually pretty easy to Expose to the Right as you control all the light and theirs usually more than enough to go around.
Shoot RAW - this has all kinds of advantages
Get a gray target. Failing that, you have at least three different neutrals in this image (the boy's shirt, the dog's fur - both the white and the black, the backdrop). Use one or more of these to get a good first approximation for setting the WB - that will help loads in getting the skin right.
If you haven't already, take a read of this page. It'll help you get the skin tones nailed down correctly. You still have a huge amount of magenta in the skin.
Shoot a little wider than you think you need to - gives you room to crop to different format sizes, allowing the customer to select 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, etc.
Make sure each of your subjects can, without moving their head, actaully see all of your "front exposure" lights - ask them, "Can you see this light? ... How about this one? .... Good" I'll leave it as an exercise for the student why they must be able to see all the lights without having someone else's head in the way.

For a first attempt at portraits, this is really quite good

(that sounds like I think I know what I'm talking about

).

The pose, with respect to head hight, etc is quite good. None are at the same height. You haven't stacked anyone. You have lots of triangles and a couple of diagonals - all these are good compositional elements.
You got the dog to actually look at the camera - that's worth at least 10 extra bonus points!
:cry You cut off the boy's right arm!
I like the body contact between the various family members. This really helps to knit them all together.
A little more light on the boy's jacket / girl's dress / black fur would help to seperate these three a bit more.

Grumpy_one · February 26, 2009

Scott_Quier wrote:

I was looking at the first photo before I finished reading the introduction and was getting ready to comment on how under-exposed the shot was.

Then I saw the "before PP" :lol

The processed one is so much better. It looks like you did a pretty good job with the skin tones.

A couple of hints to make life easier<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif" border="0" alt="" > :
Get the exposure right in camera. With portraits, it's usually pretty easy to Expose to the Right as you control all the light and theirs usually more than enough to go around.

Shoot RAW - this has all kinds of advantages

Get a gray target. Failing that, you have at least three different neutrals in this image (the boy's shirt, the dog's fur - both the white and the black, the backdrop). Use one or more of these to get a good first approximation for setting the WB - that will help loads in getting the skin right.

If you haven't already, take a read of this page. It'll help you get the skin tones nailed down correctly. You still have a huge amount of magenta in the skin.

Shoot a little wider than you think you need to - gives you room to crop to different format sizes, allowing the customer to select 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, etc.

Make sure each of your subjects can, without moving their head, actaully see all of your "front exposure" lights - ask them, "Can you see this light? ... How about this one? .... Good" I'll leave it as an exercise for the student why they must be able to see all the lights without having someone else's head in the way.

For a first attempt at portraits, this is really quite good <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" > (that sounds like I think I know what I'm talking about <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/rolleyes1.gif" border="0" alt="" >).
<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" > The pose, with respect to head hight, etc is quite good. None are at the same height. You haven't stacked anyone. You have lots of triangles and a couple of diagonals - all these are good compositional elements.

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" > You got the dog to actually look at the camera - that's worth at least 10 extra bonus points!

:cry You cut off the boy's right arm!

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif" border="0" alt="" > I like the body contact between the various family members. This really helps to knit them all together.

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif" border="0" alt="" > A little more light on the boy's jacket / girl's dress / black fur would help to seperate these three a bit more.

Scott, just the kind of response I was looking for, thanks. Ok...here is the photo completely untouched. I did convert from RAW. I do everything in RAW. As far as body contact, triangles, diagonals… blind luck. If you took the magenta reading from me, I already took a lot out from my face. Too much and it began to look unnatural. Look at the before pp photo and you’ll see how red my face is compared to the rest of my family. As far as cutting my sons arm off, it was just easier to crop than do some fancy stamping and masking. Didn’t know it at the time that the background was amiss. This was primarily about skin tones. As far as the dog, we had someone at the camera getting his attention. As far as WB, ya, was thinking of getting a Wibal card (or make my own). I do this thing with threshold that spreads out the histogram, helps in wb a little too. Here's the first post on the series. Thanks again

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