My attempt using fill flash outside

JulieLawsonPhotography

Please let me know your honest thoughts. Am I close to hitting a home run yet? :dunno

Post processing was a color boost, and a slight edge burn action, opacity decreased.

codiac2600

You did it just right

Beautiful looks and just the right amount of fill to make things blend well.

What color boost and action did you use?

DonnaLu

Agreed...
no evidence of fill flash, the subject is well lit, so in my book, you succeded! Nice dof, too.

JulieLawsonPhotography

codiac2600 wrote:

You did it just right

Beautiful looks and just the right amount of fill to make things blend well.

What color boost and action did you use?

It's a free action from pioneerwoman.com

It is so worth looking at. There is a whole set of free actions that literally is saving me a lot of time.

Thanks for the fast response and positive feedback.

jeffreaux2

I think you have done a great job of adding in fill flash without introducing shadows. Your White balance seems a tad off though....causing the skin tones....especially in the first shot to appear a bit on the red side.

I have done some quick adjustments to give you a side by side comparison. If you find this offensive, I would be happy to remove them. It helps sometimes to see rather than recieve an explanation.
Original


WB Adjusted....added in a bit of exposure


Original and one with WB, exposure, and contrast

JulieLawsonPhotography

not offended, how else but to learn from others. But, here's the thing....I always seem to lean toward the red area in my pics. Why? that is frustrating. I'm beginning to wonder if it's my eyes, seriously because I dont' usually see the reddish hue but, sometimes..... you know?

jeffreaux2 wrote:

I think you have done a great job of adding in fill flash without introducing shadows. Your White balance seems a tad off though....causing the skin tones....especially in the first shot to appear a bit on the red side.

I have done some quick adjustments to give you a side by side comparison. If you find this offensive, I would be happy to remove them. It helps sometimes to see rather than recieve an explanation.
Original


WB Adjusted....added in a bit of exposure


Original and one with WB, exposure, and contrast

jeffreaux2

I hear ya.....

I get in trouble if I spend too much time in front of a PC. Everything begins to look the same. If you are calibrating your monitor you surely cannot blame it on that!!!

I shoot the majority of my photos in the exact conditions your two appear to have been shot. Overcast or shade outdoors, and typically using fill flash. I shoot RAW+jpeg and set WB later in post production. I set the WB on my camera to cloudy so that the jpegs I view onscreen will be somewhat near what I will be looking for in post. Maybe something I do that is different is to use a color correcting gel on the flash. This tints the flash to blue....like the light we find in shady areas. This helps to balance color temperatures of the subject with that of the BG. Your photos seemed fine in this respect. I only truely notice a big shift when using the flash at stronger settings. The technique helps to keep the photos from looking "flashy". One advantage with the gel is that it seems to "knock out" some of the reds in skin tones. Maybe I am imagining this, but I haven't had the problems with it that I used to.....at least not as severe and often.

As far as exposure, if your camera has a histogram, use it to set exposure. Try to get your values to shift as far to the right as possible without blowing your highlights. This will get you more punch out of camera with less work in post.

Hope this is of some help.

Sam

First, your cheating. The little girl is way too cute to take a bad photo.

I think the flash work looks very good. I might want to try brighting up the images a little, but Jeff's post while nice, is a little more than I would personally do.

Sam

ChatKat

Sam wrote:

but Jeff's post while nice, is a little more than I would personally do.

Sam

+1 here too. Somewhere inbetween would be to my liking.

joshhuntnm

Can't see the flash. Looks great to me!

Swartzy

Julie, these are done very well. I don't think you have a white balance issue...in fact the colors are very close. The first one, her red skin tones could come down just a little. The greens and yellows on Jeff's mod are too saturated from here (24 inch IMac display w/10 profiles). I think you could just add a tiny bit of curves pop...but not too much otherwise the facial features get blown out. There is no evidence of flash in these and blended perfectly.

Very nice indeed.

JulieLawsonPhotography

Thanks everyone, your replies were so encouraging. With Jeff's response, it did help me to "see" the red. So I am watching out for that as I finish editing the rest of the pictures.

Thanks again

Swartzy wrote:

Julie, these are done very well. I don't think you have a white balance issue...in fact the colors are very close. The first one, her red skin tones could come down just a little. The greens and yellows on Jeff's mod are too saturated from here (24 inch IMac display w/10 profiles). I think you could just add a tiny bit of curves pop...but not too much otherwise the facial features get blown out. There is no evidence of flash in these and blended perfectly.

Very nice indeed.

SloYerRoll

Swartzy wrote:

(24 inch IMac display w/10 profiles).

Why on earth do you need 10 profiles?

Swartzy

SloYerRoll wrote:

Why on earth do you need 10 profiles?

Heheh, sRGB, Adobe 1998, WHCC, Colormetric, EZPrints....well, you get the idea.:D:D:D

Rhinotherunt

Agreed... I cannot see the flash.

Not bad shots. Looks as though she is not a very willing model.

Prairiemaiden

skin tones
I like the first one. I have a calibrated monitor and the one adjusted looks like the highlights are blown a bit. Also it really adds dark look around the eyes. The original shot looks more natural to me, possible bump up the curves in the skin just a bit? Cute picture.

sweet caroline

Your flash work looks good. I agree that you need to bump up the exposure a touch and work on the white balance a little (it's not too far off to me), but that stuff's easy enough in post. Getting the right level of flash is much harder.

Caroline

lilmomma

they look great! I agree about the exposure bump, and maybe warm it slightly. Care to share the process? Like I'm assuming it was an external flash mounted on camera, but I'm not sure...how did you determine the output? I've always wondered what a good technique is for using fill outdoors. Did you have it pointing directly on her?

TGAllen

Perfect with the flash!

JulieLawsonPhotography

wow this is an old post. This was taken with my d40x...on camera flash. I had just used a piece of TP to cover the flash. This was taken before I had an external flash, or reflector.