Post processing

Grumpy_one

Noob looking for assurance. Let me know how I'm doing. Here is one taken this morning at the bus stop.



here is original


thanks!

SloYerRoll

Pretty close. Really good if your a NOOB!

Here are a few of the nits I see when I brought it into ACR.

• Skins tones are a bit yellow. (bring down yellow saturation just a hare for the easiest fix) *This may also be an uncalibrated monitor and it looks spot on through the screen your seeing it on.
• lost allot of detail in the jacket. Which may not be a big deal to you. (bump up your recovery slider to about the 3/4 point) *Doing this will also help the washed out look on your daughters face (You'll see what I mean when you play w/ the slider)
• 1/125 was a little bit slow. There's nowhere on the shot that I see that's tack sharp. (Bump up your shutter speed a bit and this will fix that problem easily)

Overall the shot is very nice though! Take this as constructive feedback designed to help you out for future shots.

Grumpy_one

SloYerRoll wrote:

Pretty close. Really good if your a NOOB!

Here are a few of the nits I see when I brought it into ACR.

• Skins tones are a bit yellow. (bring down yellow saturation just a hare for the easiest fix) *This may also be an uncalibrated monitor and it looks spot on through the screen your seeing it on.
• lost allot of detail in the jacket. Which may not be a big deal to you. (bump up your recovery slider to about the 3/4 point) *Doing this will also help the washed out look on your daughters face (You'll see what I mean when you play w/ the slider)
• 1/125 was a little bit slow. There's nowhere on the shot that I see that's tack sharp. (Bump up your shutter speed a bit and this will fix that problem easily)

Overall the shot is very nice though! Take this as constructive feedback designed to help you out for future shots.

I've been waiting a whole day for constructive feedback. Where's the recovery slide? This was taken in a hurry. Thanks!!

Grumpy_one

Oh, and whats ACR?

SloYerRoll

I guess a good question to ask is what kind of software you use for image editing.

ACR = Adobe Camera Raw
The recovery slider is in the ACR dialog box and lightroom.

Grumpy_one

SloYerRoll wrote:

I guess a good question to ask is what kind of software you use for image editing.

ACR = Adobe Camera Raw
The recovery slider is in the ACR dialog box and lightroom.

I'm using Photoshop CS3, just saw lightroom for the first time at my neighbors house, looks like a cool app. Might try the 30 day trial. What's prefered here? Thanks

SloYerRoll

Grumpy_one wrote:

I'm using Photoshop CS3, just saw lightroom for the first time at my neighbors house, looks like a cool app. Might try the 30 day trial. What's prefered here? Thanks

I have both. I use Lr for photos and Ps for graphic design and detailed photo work.
It's personal preference but I'll admit, when I started using Lr. I hated it. Now I have no idea how I got on w/o it.

I've got to run out, but I'll post soon w/ details on the things I talked to you about earlier so it makes more sense. (unless someone else posts)

jfriend

Grumpy_one wrote:

Noob looking for assurance. Let me know how I'm doing. Here is one taken this morning at the bus stop.

I think the answer to your question depends upon what you want. Your changes have added color saturation, boosted contrast and lost some detail in some of the brighter and darker areas. You've gained more brilliant colors, but lost in a few other areas.

Here's a more conservative approach (not necessarily better, just different):

• Use the highlight slider in the shadow/highlights dialog in CS to recover detail in the bright whites (hat, jacket, dog).
• Use the shadow slider in the shadow/highlights dialog in CS to recover detail in the shadows (girl's hair and dog's black fur, face and eyes) - I went with amount=31%, width=15%, radius=30px.
• Mask off the shadow adjustment so it doesn't affect the background if you want (I filled the mask with black, then used a soft large brush to just quickly let the effect through on the girls hair and the dogs black fur).
• Bring some detail back in the red bow on her cap by reducing the lightness of the reds in a hue/sat adjustment layer (I set Lightness to -8). It's probably too bright to print the way it is anyway.
• Neutralize a slight blue color cast in the image. I used a curve and just pulled the right end of the blue channel down until a couple points in her jacket and her hat and the dog's fur got blue at or below red and green.
• Sharpen
• I chose not to add contrast at this point because I liked how it looked. You have nice even overcast lighting so you aren't supposed to have big contrast. I also didn't want to lose detail in either the darks or lights which adding contrast tends to do.
• When I check on skin-tone values, I like where they are after these adjustments. The removal of the slight blue cast made the skin a little more yellow than it was, but it works for me.

Here's the three versions:

Your original:


My edited version:


Your edited version:

SloYerRoll

EDIT:
jfriend did a great job posting. The only reason I'm posting this is because I already had this whole thing typed out and don't want to see it go to waste:D

OK so I'm gonna assume that you use Bridge (Br) since it's part of the Photoshop (Ps) package.

Go to your preferences window (ctrl + k windows - cmd + k mac) by default the general tab is selected. Under performance and File Handling, check the box that says, "Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG and TIFF Files" then exit out of the preferences panel. Close down Br completely & restart. Open the shot* posted in this thread.

This will open up an Adobe Camera Raw dialog box. You will see the shot on the left side of the box and the histogram and a bunch of options on the right. By default it opens on the "Basic" tab. Under this tab you'll see options like Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light. This is where I was talking about in my initial post. There's a decent tutorial here on how these sliders work.

I'll be happy to help out more, but this is a good point for you to do a little bit of reading and goof around w/ the sliders and see what they do.

*If Br doesn't open the image in ACR. It's because the cache in Br remembers that it didn't do this before you changed the settings. Go to this Adobe KB article and read post 21 to fix this problem.

Grumpy_one

Ok, cool, another tool to get absorbed in! So my question is now, how is this better than doing post process in PS? And now that LR is in the mix, I'll be playing around with that now!! All I can say is holy cow!! So much to play with. Oh and by the way, I found the button you were talking about under thumbnails, it was already clicked, I found a button in the general tab, behavior "double-click edits camera raw settings in bridge" that opened the file in Camera Raw 4.0 (am I missing anything with 4.2?) Thanks, I'll be asking for more help later! Thanks again.

SloYerRoll

Grumpy_one wrote:

how is this better than doing post process in PS

It's more intuative and you don't need to surf through as many menus. Different ppl feel differnet than I. But I can do about 99% of all my photo editing w/o even launching Ps.

Grumpy_one wrote:

(am I missing anything with 4.2?)

Nothing you'll notice.

Grumpy_one

There's something to be said about calibrating monitor's. I counldn't see the dogs eye's on my upstairs desktop, but on my laptop, they're right there. Real clear. Lots to learn, lots to learn. This is just what I'm looking for. Thanks jfriend and SloYerRoll!!