family Christmas photo

Elaine

This isn't my family, but a friend of mine. I feel really rusty! I haven't been shooting any posed portraits lately as I've been doing more of my son's swim team. The boy in this photo has been a challenge for me to get a genuine smile out of (we did get one in an individual shot though!), but it's not so bad, I hope. I've never tried including an animal in a family shot either. I think it worked out. I was rather pleased how my get-the-Christmas-tree-through-the-window idea worked.

This is all natural light, shot with the Canon 7D and the 85 1.8 at f/4, 1/200, ISO 800, edited in LR3. I wanted to take it over to CS3 to fix a couple things, but I can't get it to open right now.

I'd love to know how this looks to you folks!

1 - better dog


2 - better people

jiro

Either of the two looks quite OK to me. I'd probably clone out the chain on the left shoulder of the boy as it looks like it's growing out of him. JMO. If you do that you have no option but to clone out the chain on the right, too. I'm not so sure if that is a shadow anomaly on the left side of the face of the kid, but I'd probably clone that out, too.

VayCayMom

Nice job, kids, boys that age can be very difficult to get a natural expression from. It would be very very easy to cut and paste the dog's head from one photo to the next, or at least the one eye that is showing, shaggy little guy!

Elaine

jiro wrote: »

Either of the two looks quite OK to me. I'd probably clone out the chain on the left shoulder of the boy as it looks like it's growing out of him. JMO. If you do that you have no option but to clone out the chain on the right, too. I'm not so sure if that is a shadow anomaly on the left side of the face of the kid, but I'd probably clone that out, too.

I wondered about the chains. Thanks for your input! The boy's face has a huge bruise/scratch on it where he ran into a door this week. I told them I could remove it, or it could stay and just be a memory. I think I'd like to at least take out the scratch part. I would have already done it, but I just realized that my 7D files are not compatible with moving from LR3 over to CS3, which is where I'd take care of those things. I also wanted to remove the scraggly end of his belt. I caught that in other shots, but not these.

Elaine

VayCayMom wrote: »

Nice job, kids, boys that age can be very difficult to get a natural expression from. It would be very very easy to cut and paste the dog's head from one photo to the next, or at least the one eye that is showing, shaggy little guy!

Thank you! It crossed my mind to try the dog head swap. I've only done that sort of thing a couple times, but I'm glad to hear it should work. My other idea was to at least give an eye some sparkle. So, do you think #2 should be the keeper, with improvements to the dog?

jiro

Mind if I play Elaine?
Tried to work around your images inside photoshop. Hope I did not offend you.

Elaine

jiro wrote: »

Tried to work around your images inside photoshop. Hope I did not offend you.

Hey, looks good! I can see it can be done! Now, I just need to figure it out.

EDIT: How much of the dog did you do?

jiro

Elaine wrote: »

Hey, looks good! I can see it can be done! Now, I just need to figure it out.

EDIT: How much of the dog did you do?

Just copy and paste a portion of the head on a separate layer and them some erasures here and there.

Elaine

OK...here's a reworked version of #2 with a swap of the dog's face from #1, and some general cleaning up. Does it work?

jiro

Awesome! clap