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Help with PP wedding photos
jm94085
Registered Users Posts: 122 Major grins
Hi...below are some examples of some photos from my wedding where we were fighting with shadows and was wondering if anyone could help with a good workflow for best fixing these images?
Note I have the raw files and access to work with DPP, PS CS4 and Noiseware.
Thanks,
John
#1
#2
#3
Note I have the raw files and access to work with DPP, PS CS4 and Noiseware.
Thanks,
John
#1
#2
#3
0
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Did you shoot in JPEG or RAW?
edit.. just reread your post.. and do see that you got RAWs..
you could try to lighten the darks and shadows in the first shot.
second shot, I'm thinking, you would be best of editing out the sunpatch on the guy's sleeve, and then changing exposure/brightness..
last one will be the easiest to brighten up..
all shots are underexposed, though.. what did you meter off?
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The photographer was a friend who came out from the East coast and there are plenty of great images that were filled with flash, however there are also many many potentially great images where the lighting was very difficult to say the least.
I can see what needs to be done in the images...however, in my case I'm not a PS wizard and am more looking for good workflows for fixing them.
For example "editing out the sunpatch on the guy's sleeve" sounds a lot easier than I'm sure it actually is?
cheers,
John
Patch of the sun. I would try to pull the texture of costume from another spot in the shot, then overlay it on top of the lit up area.
It may darken the area to make it look like it was in a shade.
with the third shot, working in camera raw, i'd raise exposure by .5, then bump blacks to 7-8, adjust saturation.. then move to the tone curves. there, i'd darken the darks, and lighten the lights.
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Open a RAW file in CS4 and it should take you into ACR.
That is where you want to pull up those shadows. You will get much more/better recovery doing it there than you will after the RAW conversion. The Exposure, Recovery, and Fill Light sliders will be your primary helpers.
If necessary, also fix the White Balance while you are in ACR.
After that (in CS4 proper) you can:
1. Apply some Noise Reduction if necessary. Make it selective if possible.
2. Make additional tweaks and touch-ups.
3. Crop, resize and sharpen.
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Sam
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Did everything in PS. I created two curve adjustment masks... one to brighten the image and one to darken. I then inverted the mask and used a soft brush to mask each layer in. I brighten the people in pics and then selectively darkened the background in areas. Created another curve adjustment layer to give an overall boost to the brightness, which I again masked. I finished it off with a bit of contrast boost through a curves layer and ran it through Noiseware Professional plugin. This was pretty quick and dirty... took me all of 4 minutes.
You can see some artifacts where I brought out the details in the faces but I was working with a very small jpg file. You can get much better results from the RAW file. Given more time with the RAW file, I'd probably either try to clone those chairs out or at least tone them down a bit. I'd probably also same with the house behind them. Oh... and I didn't touch the WB. Didn't look to bad on the monitor I am using.
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I took a different approach and worked with the Screen blending mode in layers. I duplicated the background layer and selected "Screen" for the blending mode, then I did it again to the second layer. I then (not as carefully as YOU would have done) created a mask over the people and erased the BG in both blended layers, leaving me with the original BG, which was not the OP's concern. You don't have to look too hard to see where my ham-handed selection tools missed the mark, but that's not the fault of the layer blending mode, which is the point of my post. I've often found the "Multiply" and Screen" modes to be much more effective than curves and layers in saving over and under-exposed shots. What's different about my approach is that I sometimes (as here) do it more than once.
Oh, and "Saving" "(Re)Loading"a selection is a HUGE time saver for me, cause often use the same selection in multiple layers.
(edit) Oh, forgot, I also applied a simple 5 second Levels adjustment to the Selection to give the people a bit more presence.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
14-24 24-70 70-200mm (vr2)
85 and 50 1.4
45 PC and sb910 x2
http://www.danielkimphotography.com
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I agree with you... this might sound funny but I didn't feel like important the pics into LR so I just did it in PS.
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yep..for more then slight adjustments you need to redo the curves/contrast to make it look more natural.
14-24 24-70 70-200mm (vr2)
85 and 50 1.4
45 PC and sb910 x2
http://www.danielkimphotography.com
I would be interested in seeing your results with lightroom "fill light" and comparing the two.
It might save us time in the future if we see that fill light can do just as well.
Thanks
-Kevin
this is about the best I can do with the small jpg file. I just boosted the fill light to about 60..maxed out recovery slider..boosted over all exposure just a touch then brought down luminesence on a few colors to saturate the colors some. I think I could have done a bit more with the raw files. The subjects could have used more exposure but I chose to keep the background in check.
14-24 24-70 70-200mm (vr2)
85 and 50 1.4
45 PC and sb910 x2
http://www.danielkimphotography.com