Friday, July 10, 2009

Constructive Feedback Friday



Normally, when I get my exposure right, I have no problem editing my photos. This shot SOOC was so completely under exposed, but I wanted to save it because I love it! I did all my adjustments in Photoshop RAW. Thank goodness I was shooting in RAW. I like what I did, but if anyone could tell me how to make it better I would appreciate it. I guess with the underexposure... adding in light created the graininess of the photo. It also turned a purple color that I adjusted out in RAW. Any feedback from the experts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!!

Taken with a Canon 5D Mark II & 24-105mm f/4 L Lens
93mm
f/4
1/1250
ISO 100

(I know, I know... I was going from sunny outside light to inside a gazebo on a pier... change the settings ~ duh!)
SOOC:



After:



Here's the suggestion from Yelena (Thank you)... a chocolate b/w version! Love this!

8 comments:

  1. Seriously, I love your changes. We all have situations where we forget to change the settings and want to kick ourselves. I think you know what your settings should have been in a gazebo, so no help needed there. I think you fixed the exposure beautifully and the texture works really well with this photo.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, great recovery! I would have cropped a little tighter though, his arm looks cut off when cropped on a joint. focus more on the face and the hand that he is holding and you have a winner!

    ReplyDelete
  3. That always happens to me! When I'm running around and changing settings all the time I get so frustrated that I just want to switch to automatic! But you did an awesome job editing this one! I would try converting it to B&W and seeing how it looks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey, Marshall from I Heart Faces here. First of all, great save! The quality of image that you were able to extract from the original speak to your talent and the incredible flexibility of the images coming from the 5D MkII. On a technical note, I've been shooting a lot more in Aperture priority these days and it's help reduce the number of times this happens to me. And trust me, it's happened a lot.

    Ok, the image. I agree with the previous comments about the noise or grain working well. It seems like texture and not a digital artifact. To see what I could come up with, I grabbed your first processed image and popped that into Photoshop. Here's a link to my version if you want to check it out while I go along.

    http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y248/fxmixer/Jul052009_2328a-web-1.jpg

    I started by cropping in even tighter to bring the focus even more on his face. I then cloned out the a few of the freckles/moles on his arm and face. This is just a personal taste thing.

    I agreed with Yelena that a black and white conversion would be cool, so I converted it with a plug-in called Silver Efex Pro. This not only made the image more simple for me, but it evened out some of the tones in his face as well. I brought down the overall brightness a tad and added a touch of contrast. I then added a vignette to further focus the attention towards his face. Lastly, I shifted the tone of the image slightly towards the silver side.

    Thanks so much for participating in the Constructive Feedback! I hope this was helpful and gives you some ideas to knock around. Feel free to email me about this or any future images. Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  5. See I don't understand what any of your commenters are saying...I am beginning to think photoshop is wayyy too complicated for me!

    Love what you did with the picture though...even though I have no idea how you did it :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi Catherine!

    I just wanted to say that I love this photo so much that I was hoping you'd let us feature it as one of our future Friday Fix-It photos. If you are interested in doing this, please just send me an email (iheartfaces@hotmail.com) and I'll let you know what I need from you to get started. :)

    Thanks,

    ~Angie
    co-founder of iHeartFaces

    ReplyDelete
  7. He is so adorable. I love the fixes you made. Wow. The chocolate black and white conversion is so perfect. Sweet as can be!

    ReplyDelete