Anne

salazar

Anne & I were sitting in a restaurant today, waiting for lunch and I realised I had Anne's camera in my pocket. She's very patient with me, fortunately. This is what I came up with. I don't have photoshop so I used Google's Picassa2 to play with the contrast and warm up the colour temperature a bit. What do you think?

ziggy53

There is a lot to like about this image. The only thing I believe that would improve it a tad, is to add some sharpening to the eyes.

I used PhotoShop USM in both a global and local sharpening:

ziggy53

BTW, you could use the GIMP to do the same.

salazar

ziggy53, Thank you very much! A friend of mine has become very good with portraits and I've noticed how careful she is with the eyes. She mentioned she uses unsharpen mask quite a bit. I knew I had to sharpen the eyes but didn't have the know-how or tools to do it. I'll take a look at GIMP but I'm really hoping to get my hands on PhotoShop after Christmas to learn how to use that. Are the two programs (GIMP vs. PhotoShop) at all similar in how they are used? Will learning one help with learning the other?

Ted Szukalski

I do not use GIMP but you may want to read their tutorials:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Smart_Sharpening/

kygarden

salazar wrote:

ziggy53, Thank you very much! A friend of mine has become very good with portraits and I've noticed how careful she is with the eyes. She mentioned she uses unsharpen mask quite a bit. I knew I had to sharpen the eyes but didn't have the know-how or tools to do it. I'll take a look at GIMP but I'm really hoping to get my hands on PhotoShop after Christmas to learn how to use that. Are the two programs (GIMP vs. PhotoShop) at all similar in how they are used? Will learning one help with learning the other?

Just my personal opinion...but I use GIMP and well, the learning curve is much steeper with GIMP. If you can get your hands on a copy of Photoshop Elements, I think you would be very pleased with that...more so than GIMP. I don't mind using GIMP because I don't use it for much and I don't mind the not-so-friendly user interface. If you haven't been blessed with the geek gene, I would recommend Photoshop over GIMP any day.

ziggy53

kygarden wrote:

... If you haven't been blessed with the geek gene, I would recommend Photoshop over GIMP any day.

'Tis true, GIMP takes some getting used to, and it's slow. It's not my first choice, but when I travel to see my Lady, 3 hours away, GIMP lets me keep on doing postprocessing (because she will never be able to justify anything that's too costly. GIMP is free.)

There is an interface called "GIMPshop" that gets you closer to PhotoShop in appearance, and close enough that some, not all, PhotoShop tutorials can be used, especially for PS7 or therebouts.

To see how close:

http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241

To get GIMPshop for Windows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

Understand that I don't have or use GIMPshop, so I can't verify it's use.

Actually, I just stumbled a bit and found everything eventually.

ziggy53

photogmomma

Definitely the second version with the sharpened eyes. Just wonderful capture! I absolutely love how you really got her eyes to show how they go with her hair.

Beautiful woman and beautiful photo!