Cropping

chrisjlee

I'm not very good at portraits & i didn't know about the rule of avoid cutting off limbs. I still want to keep the loose composition; but i want to save this picture any suggestions?




I would also like to keep that little green fringe out of the picture which is at the bottom of the frame.

chrisjlee

cool. :uhoh

DavidTO

Chris,

Nice shot. It lacks pop, which is easily fixed in post. I opened it and avoided doing everything in LAB, but just stuck to basic RGB changes.

Here's what I got:




And here's what I did. First I adjusted the curves so they looked like this:



I then boosted saturation and applied photo filter 81 at around 25% opacity (don't remember exactly). I then set the crop to 10x8 and cropped a bit tighter, which I think helps.

DavidTO

Home, bored with a bad back, I tried this in LAB as well, and ended up with this (no crop in this version):



Here are the curves. Notice that the B curve I moved the center point over to bring up the yellow, since her skin had too much magenta relative to yellow. I also made a little move in the blue to take out the blue cast on her shirt, from the sky.

chrisjlee

DavidTO wrote:

Home, bored with a bad back, I tried this in LAB as well, and ended up with this (no crop in this version):



Here are the curves. Notice that the B curve I moved the center point over to bring up the yellow, since her skin had too much magenta relative to yellow. I also made a little move in the blue to take out the blue cast on her shirt, from the sky.

Thanks. A lot. I'm beginning to understand the whole LAB processing. Hope your back feels better.

Andy

cutting off limbs
while not absolute, a general rule of thumb is to chop a limb midway between the joints. so, you did fine

chrisjlee

andy wrote:

while not absolute, a general rule of thumb is to chop a limb midway between the joints. so, you did fine

ah alright thanks. had no idea.
i think it was you who told me "midway between the joints"