Portrait Attempts

[sherryrowe]

Ok, I'm having a surprisingly hard time with my portrait attempts. It sure is a heckuva lot harder than it looks!! It doesn't help that I get terribly impatient with myself if I don't catch on to something immediately. Working on that. Anyway, check out these 2...are they good? Bad? So-so? How would you go about editing them? I'd like to print and frame a couple of 5x7's or 8x10's.

[sherryrowe]

Oh, and this one. I know it needs a little color correction to give her skin the yellow tone it actually has, but does it need cropping? And the finger splint....I can't decide if it's horribly distracting or if it perfectly completes the story of who my crazy kid is.

[Tiberius]

Photo 1: The lighting here loks a little flat, and the pose looks a little uncomfortable with her left arm up like that. Also watchout for those crooked horizontals! I'd suggest a golden reflector to add some modelling light into this, a bit of a warmer colour. Also, check your horizontals and verticals to amke sure they are straight.

Photo 2: Very nice, the depth of field is very good for this scene. Her face is a little dark though, but this can be fixed by a bit of bounced light onto her face, or the shadows/highlights controls in Photoshop.

Photo 3: Apart from the colour correction you mentioned, I'd say that the pic wouldn't need cropping - as long as there was something in that space on the left of the frame that tied in to her, such as a puppy or a favorite toy. As it is, the picture can be cut in half down the middle to give a portrait orientation. The finger splint is a little distracting, but only because it isn't immediately obvious what it is (I've never sen a finger splint like that). It's a great shot, and would be well worth it to take the picture again once she's splint free.

[Nicole]

For me, my overall impression is that the colours are a bit on the cool side. They could be a little warmer, and this can be done pretty easily. What sort of photo editing program are you using?

Photo 1 is ok to me. As I said before, warm up the tones a little bit and it will help. I think that the composition is good, and would disagree with the idea that the pose looks uncomfortable. It seems like that kind of thing that kids do, it would've been the kind of thing I'd do as a little kid

Photo 2 is too dark on her face. I've done a bit of editing to try to get the colours better. What I did was duplicate the picture into a new layer, set that layer to "Screen". I then adjusted the shadows / highlights by lightening the shadows by 15%. Finally, I used the "burn" tool on the background to darken that a little to make her face pop more (I'm sure you would take more time to get all the details, but this is just a quick edit). Oh, I also applied a warming filter under Photo Filters (using Elements). This is the result:


Photo 3 would benefit from the same sort of treatment as photo 2. This one is really on the cool side of the colours. I think that the positioning is good again. I don't see anything wrong with the finger splint. As you said, it shows who your kid is. For the future though I would watch cutting off just the tip of the head and the edge of the arm though. Even backing off just a little would be ok. As it is positioned, it's ok, so that is for future reference when taking pictures. I think I get the sort of position you were trying to go for though. Here's this one with very similar adjustments to photo 2, but I changed the opacity of the screen layer to 40% and didn't lighten the highlights.

[jiminyClickit]

sherryrowe,

You provided very good material compositionally and in subject pose/expressions.

Nicole,

You took them the rest of the way into portrait quality. You are better than you tell people.