Need Input

CyberSteak

Ok let me start this off by doing a little self critique...

The compositions a mess
The background is cluttered and distracting
It looks right amature-ish (it should since I'm quite the amature still)

Ok now that that's out of the way. I'm trying to salvage this photo as best as I can. Though I'm now starting to wonder if it's worth the work in trying.

- I corrected the white balance from daylight (what it was taken at) to cloudy (which it was).

- Added fill light to brighten things up

- took out any distracting elements (blanket and half the car)

- and eliminated most of the road running through their heads

But still it looks...bad. Maybe it's just me. But go ahead and be brutally honest. It won't break my will to get better...much.

Original


Edit

CyberSteak

24 views and nobdy has anything to say?

kidzmom

CyberSteak wrote:

24 views and nobdy has anything to say?

I think it is a great family shot! The expressions are the most important thing and you captured that wonderfully! It isn't easy to get the baby to be happy (unless he is Mr. Happy Go Lucky). I agree with taking out the blanket...but I think I like the color of the water/grass better in the 1st shot. This is just personal preference though...Bringing up the light was great for their faces. I think they will be happy with it!

CyberSteak

At last!!! Feedback.

Regarding the colour of the grass/water. When I added fill light in elements, it was during the initial open stage of the RAW file. It was applied to the whole photo and unfortunately, the green got a whole lot lighter. I'm still just dabbling in Light Room and Elements. Up until a couple of months ago, all my photo editing was done in Microsoft Picture It 99 (yes...1999).

I'm having an absolute hard time trying to figure out if I maybe lightened it up too much. Or if the shadow on the dads face is just too extreme that I'm not going to find a happy medium. Also not ruling out the thought that it's my LCD screen that's messing with the image as it sits a fair bit lower then my eyes so the viewing angle isn't the best (may actually print the Edited version to get a better idea).

<---his absolute worse critic.

adbsgicom

Here's quickie edit. I think the guys face is a bit dark, and it doesn't look like you had any fill flash to help the eyes. So I pushed the levels up, and then masked out mom, child and his shirt. Dodged about 20% around mom and dad's eyes, and patch-tooled a couple of hotspots. Far from an ideal job, but do you think this is more of what you wanted?

family.jpg

CyberSteak

Hey, thanks for the quick edit. So you thought is face was still too dark? But the rest wasn't too light? Which hotspots did you take care of? That's something I don't think I've trained my eye to pick up yet.

angevin1

I think you cleaned it up quite well, and are being a bit harsh on yourself.

You could easily add a Gaussian Blur to much of the BG and get rid of as much definition as you like. Plus, if you shot in RAW, then I think there is more potential laying in there as far as light goes.

If you send me the RAW file, I'll give it a whirr~

adbsgicom

1) Take up Tom on his offer. He's much better at this than me, and my edits were on the jpg.
2) I modified the levels and let it lighten his face and the b/g. Mainlly it was his face I thought felt a bit dark. I ran the dodge tool at 20% midtones over the darker areas of the eyes. Perhaps a little more boost could help, but I only had a couple of minutes this AM. Little bits of shine were the top of his right cheek (camera right), top of nose and a bit on her right cheek.

If you spent a little time playing with those aspects I'm sure you could come up with a much better edit than what I did in 3 minutes.

CyberSteak

Ok well I'm giving it another go. I'm not going to bother lightening anything other then the family. The only real dark issue is shadowing on the father's face. angevin1 (Tom is it?) I'll let you know if I get frustrated in the process. And yeah...I probably am being too harsh. I am my worse critic for sure. Thanks for the efforts and input guys. Stay tune for the next attempt.

angevin1

CyberSteak wrote:

Ok well I'm giving it another go. I'm not going to bother lightening anything other then the family. The only real dark issue is shadowing on the father's face. angevin1 (Tom is it?) I'll let you know if I get frustrated in the process. And yeah...I probably am being too harsh. I am my worse critic for sure. Thanks for the efforts and input guys. Stay tune for the next attempt.

will do..and yes, it's tom, or angevin1 or hey you, you with the camera....

CyberSteak

Ok, I think I got it.



Kept the white balance. Took care of shadows on the family. Took care of some highlights. Edited the background a bit more. And there it is. Thought?

And if anyone knows of a quick way to take care of stray hairs in Elements, please advise. I wouldn't have touch the mom's hair at all had I decided not to wipe out the road. But once that went, the battle started.

CyberSteak

*bump* er...any thoughts on this edit?

angevin1

CyberSteak wrote:

*bump* er...any thoughts on this edit?

Yeah, like the improvement of the lighting and softness of faces. I took this photo and made a little crop from it and it seemed to work nicely, have you tried a crop on it yet?

CyberSteak

Yeah I cropped it to size for an 8x10. I didn't take much out in the process. There's a little bit of space behind the dad's back and the mom's knee gets cut off a bit. I wasn't sure if I should crop it any further. What did your crop end up looking like?

kidzmom

This looks GREAT! The improvements are enormous! Very good work!!!!

divamum

Sooooo much better! The more natural WB, you adjusted shadows n icely - good job!

Dancer72

CyberSteak wrote:

Ok, I think I got it.

Kept the white balance. Took care of shadows on the family. Took care of some highlights. Edited the background a bit more. And there it is. Thought?

And if anyone knows of a quick way to take care of stray hairs in Elements, please advise. I wouldn't have touch the mom's hair at all had I decided not to wipe out the road. But once that went, the battle started.

I like the adjustments you've made to the WB & BG to come up with #3...didn't like the coloring/lighting of the water & BG in #2. The blurring technique you used to remove the road, etc made a big difference.

I use PS CS4 to PP but if I remember correctly Elements has some of the same tools. To remove the mom's stray hairs you might try using the "cloning" stamp...increase the magnification on the image to 200% or higher if necessary so you can really see that your only covering the hairs and not pieces of the BG, adjust the size of the brush to the width of the strands of hair or a bit larger, decrease the opacity of the brush to 15 - 20% and make long sweeping strokes over the hairs...they should become part of the background. May also want to run a noise filter to blend any rough edges into the remainder of the BG when your done.

Also to lighten the family's faces but not the rest of the shot, you might try using a layer and changing the mode to "screen". Then put on a black layer mask to hide the brightness change, then again use your paint brush, increased to the size of their faces, decrease the brush opacity to ~20% and slowly lighten the faces until you think they're as bright as you want them to be.

Still honing my PP skills myself, but am married to a "Pro" (also a Dgrinner) whose brain I pick constantly to improve. Hope these suggestions help.

Thanks for sharing the shots!
Caroline

CyberSteak

Cool. Thanks for all of the replies comments and suggestions. I'm definately more happy with this one. Pretty much took a throw away pic and improved it enough that I'll be presenting this one to the family tonight (got to hold them off until I get the rest done). So thanks for the previous inputs and critiques.

Dancer72 - Yes Elements does have the cloning tool. That's actually how I elimitated the road I believe (it was either that or spot healing...can't remember which as I kept bouncing between the two). I think what I needed to know what how to tweak the settings to get it just right. Your explanation is fairly thorough so I'll try that on the rest of the set. Thank you.

angevin1

CyberSteak wrote:

Yeah I cropped it to size for an 8x10. I didn't take much out in the process. There's a little bit of space behind the dad's back and the mom's knee gets cut off a bit. I wasn't sure if I should crop it any further. What did your crop end up looking like?

CyberSteak

oh wow. that's way more cropped then what I did. What else did you do to get the blurred affect around it?

Swartzy

There are many things which can enhance this shot. First off, get rid of the yellow cast which is ruling the vibrancy. Also, get the light on the subjects and off the background. I'd be happy to provide an example with a larger file then explain what and why what was done should you like. The shot isn't as bad as you perceive but it does need work.

Swartzy

Ok, for the heck of it I worked up a file with existing jpeg.

angevin1

CyberSteak wrote:

oh wow. that's way more cropped then what I did. What else did you do to get the blurred affect around it?

I did a quick Gaussian blur, then simply erased where I didn't want it blurred. You'll notice I got rid of more of their skin too, which besides the stuff that was bothering you, the skin was distracting me. Which is why often you read or hear people say, don't wear shorts to a shoot.

SO really, there's a lot of variables here to work with...look at Swartzy's rendition above..its near perfect in the light dept!

ivar

CyberSteak wrote:

The compositions a mess
The background is cluttered and distracting
It looks right amature-ish (it should since I'm quite the amature still)

Ok now that that's out of the way. I'm trying to salvage this photo as best as I can. Though I'm now starting to wonder if it's worth the work in trying.

In general, if you are already doubting the image that much I'd consider it a loss, unless it's 'this one or nothing'. It's not a bad thing.

I like Swartzy's edit best.

CyberSteak

Hmmm. Maybe it's my monitor (hope not...it's only a few months old and it's a high def 1080p). Swartzy's edit looks incredibly washed out. The father in real life has a darker complexion then the mother. In that edit, he looks far too light in comparison.

adbsgicom

Not your monitor. The edit lost most of the olive tones.

Swartzy

Working on a jpeg of this res is difficult...I did lighten him much but with the full res image it would turn out different.....Wanted to show just HOW much the exposure plays a role in the overall scope of a photograph. This shot was about 1 1/2 stops under at capture.

angevin1

Swartzy wrote:

Working on a jpeg of this res is difficult...I did lighten him much but with the full res image it would turn out different.....Wanted to show just HOW much the exposure plays a role in the overall scope of a photograph. This shot was about 1 1/2 stops under at capture.

Which is another way of saying you need/ed more light. Even with your (Cybersteak) edits, the eyes are all too dark. Part of the prob was probably getting them outside at the time of day or with whatever reflection was occuring and trying to shoot: all squinty eyed and underexposed where you want light: the eyes! Another thing was the skin. Which is why I gave a crop to get rid of skin...skin draws our eyes.

CyberSteak

Hmmm. All important things I'll remember the next time out.

Even though it was a cloudy day (which I had hoped for) the sun was at their back. That's where most of the problem was. Facing them the other way resulted in having a HORRIBLE backdrop of the back of the house, car, garage...you get the point. And I didn't use a flash much (and not in this photo) because I'm scared stiff of flash. And the only flash I do have at the moment is on camera which as we all know...horrible flash to use.

I'll have to remember the less flesh thing for the next shoot I do.

I did end up giving the couple an 8x10 of my final edit which they really loved. So I'm happy their happy. I have the rest of the photos to go through yet and I don't expect them to be as challenging as this one was. It was the worst of the bunch as far as needing to be edited.

jmphotocraft

I like your edit from 9/27, but I REALLY think you should clone out the house. It will be easy. Unless it's their house, in which case you should ask them.

The faces are all nice, the baby is happy, so you made a great capture there. In general I'd say this is a keeper worth working on, but I'm a little bothered by the guy's hairy leg, and his pose in general. Looks uncomfortable and too clingy to me. Nothing you can do about that now, but if a re-take would be easy you might suggest it.

A little fill flash next time!

CyberSteak

Hmmm...never thought of the leg hair. And yeah I contemplated cloning out the house. Probably would have been easy enough to do. But after messing around for such a long time with stray hairs, I was all cloned out.

I have suggested a re-shoot as this was originally suppose to be a engagement photo session, that turned into family portraits, that turned into baby photos. I think I tried to do too much that day. Probably easier/better to do one thing at a time? So as far as the engagement shots, there's not a lot I'm happy with. So the focus will be on that next time.