A little help with background colors?

Airedrifter · April 8, 2007

I got the kids together and did some studio work yesterday.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the first few in raw and of course the one I like was in that group.

The first is the unedited photo and the 2nd is my attempt at fixing the background. What did I do wrong (besides not shooting it in raw)

Thanks

#1

#2

wxwax · April 8, 2007

To me, the basic problem is that there's not enough light on the woman's face. The child is basically OK.

Your adjustments make for some pretty bad looking skin tones.

Are you hell bent on making the background white? Or is your primary concern that the people look good? (The latter being my recommendation.)

asylumxl · April 8, 2007

i'd say pull the white levels up a little to regain some contrast.

then what id do is add a curves/levels adjustment layer to blow the bg, then using the paint brush tool then proceed to slowly and carefully mask out the people so it only effects the bg.

http://www.ephotozine.com/techniques/viewtechnique.cfm?recid=334

heres a link on using masks in photoshop.

pathfinder · April 8, 2007

The trick is that if you want your backround to photograph as white, it will need to be exposed at about 2 stops brighter than needed for a medium grey subject in the forground.

The easiest way to do this is to include a seperate lamp/flash to illuminate the background seperately from the subject/forground. No need for post processing the background with selections in PS then. The camera will do it for you, when you expose the subject correctly.

A curve on the L channel will probably fix this image.

I took this image to LAB and steepened the L channel after mapping the facial tones first. The background is not uniform and is whiter near the subjects than the corners. SO I raised the background white near the subjects to white and then painted the periphery white with a white brush without any masking needed. This is a fast 3 minute attempt.

asylumxl · April 8, 2007

me thinks me will have a go tomorrow morning on pc with photoshop

gluwater · April 8, 2007

From my little experience with lighting so far I've found that if you expose the subject correctly than the background will be pretty close to white in a shot like this. You could light the background with a second light if the background is far from the subject but if it is only a couple feet behind than I'm not sure if it's necessary. Here is my fix for the shot. Note that the background is not blown out, it is just very light, but it looks white and if printed will have ink in it. First I made a Curves adjustment layer to set the white and black points to 245 and 15, I like these numbers because they are printable. Then I used another Curves adjustment layer to brighten the image further, mostly for the woman and child. The last Adjustment layer I used was a Hue and Saturation layer to fix the skin tones, they were way too red. Lastly I used a large white brush set at low opacity to even out the background a little. The skintones still aren't exact but it's close enough for a 5 minute edit.

A little help with background colors?

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