I'm so excited to participate in 'Constructive Feedback Friday'! Hopefully I will get mine linked quickly enough! For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, this is when the contributors from I heart faces give feedback on what in the world I could do with this photo :)
This is the original picture. I have a Canon PowerShot SX110. It is pretty much a 'point and shoot', but you can adjust quite a few of the settings. I really love taking pictures, but am completely a beginner. I don't generally make any setting adjustments...I just put it to 'auto' and go to town. However, I do have the data on the picture: f/2.8 1/60 sec. ISO 250 6.0 mm
I can adjust most (if not all) of these settings, but have never really messed around with it. I don't really know what direction to take with it, camera-wise.
My photo editing program is Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, and I have only scratched the surface when it comes to learning the program.
This is my edit. I have no idea what to do with pictures that are so dark. We were at the aquarium, and I did my best to get a good shot, but the background especially came out so dark. I tried messing around with it in Photoshop, but every time I would try and lighten it, it would just look ridiculous. I brightened the eyes a bit, and tried to play with the color of the fish, and of course, cropped it.Please, please, please, tell me what I can do (other than get a better camera ;) That's in the works...but not for a bit...)
Hello fellow photog! : ) Well, as soon as I laid eyes on your photograph of this beautiful little boy with his baby blues, two things stuck out to me. The harsh black shadowing behind his head, and the unnatural-ness (?) of the overall lighting of the image. I know you said you were just starting out and so maybe the next time, you could maybe turn off the flash for a shot like this and get a silhouette of the little boy looking into the glass with the fish. Then you would also see the detail of the colors of the water and the fish inside the tank as well. Just a thought?
ReplyDeleteOne thing you want to avoid in photography if at all possible is using flash. In my opinion, it does at least 3 bad things in a photo: creates shadows, makes distracting pinpoint lights in the eyes and blows out/creates unnatural skin tones.
ReplyDeleteI understand that avoidance of flash sometimes isn't possible, especially with a point and shoot. I used to be perfectly happy with my P&S. The other day, I borrowed my husband's P&S and wanted to throw it across the room. :) Not that point and shoots are bad; they're just really hard to use without flash.
To avoid flash, you would have to make special adjustments in your camera (if you have a manual setting choice). Make the aperture the smallest number you can and the ISO the largest number you can. The shutter speed would have to be a slow as possible without causing a blur. In a situation like this, you might not be able to get the settings right in your camera. I liked Caroline's idea to instead go for a silhouette in a situation like this.
Within Photoshop Elements, one thing you can do to bring out the details in the aquarium is to create a levels adjustment layer. Check out this tutorial to see how to adjust levels: http://photography.about.com/od/developingandprinting/ss/Levelsintro.htm This would help bring out some of the details in the aquarium behind your little boy.
Another thing I found that worked was to flatten all changes, create a duplicate layer, and then go to filter, distort, diffuse glow. I used the settings: graininess 0, glow amount 2, clear amount 17. I then reduced the opacity of that layer to about 73%. This helped to take the extreme light off the face.
When you're done, you'll definitely want to sharpen up your son's beautiful eyes. You could try out Pioneer Woman's method for sharpening eyes: http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2007/10/making-eyes-pop/
Hope that wasn't too overwhelming. You obviously wouldn't want to go through all these changes with every picture you take, but when you get a special one like this, a little extra time to make it WOW is definitely worth it. Thanks for sharing!
I think in a situation like this and given your camera, a flash is ok. I think you can do a lot more in post though. Because the fish is so dark and doesn't add to the picture, I would focus on the face in the cropping. I would maybe even try a little tilting on it. You could play with the eyes (other suggestions are great) and/or play around with the colors. Go for something different, like the seventies action from pioneer woman. You are off to a great start, but I would ditch the fish crop.
ReplyDeleteKeep saving your pennies (and dimes and quarters and dollars!!) ... you're going to love that slr camera that you buy some day, and you're going to wonder how you ever got by without it!
ReplyDeleteP&S cameras have so many limitations that slr's don't (tho, they're getting better all the time...).
All of photography is give and take. In this image, for instance, you had to use your flash in order to see your son's beautiful wide blue eyes ... BUT the flash lightened his face at the expense of the background. If you'd turned your flash OFF, you probably would have had a beautiful blue aquarium background, but a very dark face. Give and take.
You're right that there wasn't a lot you could do post-processing to bring back your dark background. Because of the flash, there's just not much detail there that you can credibly bring back.
The other thing about P&S cameras is that they don't give you as much range to post process. That's because they're already designed to give you a nicely contrasty and saturated image sooc. Which is good for having nice sooc images that are already ready to share. But it's also bad because contrast is not something you can remove once it's there. I'm saying all this just to say: don't feel bad that you couldn't do much with your fish/background. It is what it is.
Of course you could crop this (and I did. you can see the result here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skeller5/3706560689/ ). Or you could convert it to b&w or sepia (which I did and you can see it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skeller5/3706649015/). But with both of those edits you lose the "history" and "story" of being at the aquarium, so that might not serve your purposes.
The only other suggestion I have is that this might have made a nice horizontal picture if you had placed your son on the far left and filled the other two-thirds of the image with the water.
All righty. I'm no expert, but I love photoshop! I love this shot and I sooo know the frustration of getting a great expression and then having all sorts of technical stuff go wrong... Hence my great friendship with Photoshop. I've just been fooling around with it for months now, so there may be tons of shortcuts I don't know about, but here's what I did (after cropping, of course):
ReplyDelete1) using magic tool, select face and darken highlights
2) select background and lighten
3)select eyes and use unsharp mask to brighten
4) select fish and bump up the saturation to make that orange pop!
5)reduce noise a wee tad
6)sharpen a wee tad
Done!
http://i51.photo.com/albums/f370/herbofgrace/IMG_2921.jpg
Oops, that link didn't work somehow. try this one:
ReplyDeletehttp://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f370/herbofgrace/IMG_2921.jpg
Herb of Grace - that is a fantastic edit!
ReplyDeleteSkeller - I tried to look at your edits but didn't have permission but I bet they are great!
Everyone has given you such great advice, I can't add to it but have fun!
k8
I can see why you wanted to capture the wonderful expression on this childs face.
ReplyDeleteWhen you are in a room with very little light, you should turn the ISO on your camera up to 400 or even 800. These settings were meant for situations of low light. Most P&S have different settings as well. Using Auto for everything may not always be the right mode for every situation.
As for editing, I would have cropped in tightly on just the child and lose all the dark background all together.