Parcour day

[Joeri?!]

a good friend of mine practices the sport parcour, or hows its better known, free running.
i went with him for a day to take some nice photo's from him doing his thing, made many shots only it was with a sony cybershot and not my usual camera .
i think this was one of the nicest shots , tell me what u all think

[windrider86]

I think you captyred a great shot. Too bad there is so much background stuff but you cant always have the perfect setting!

[rikkersc]

I agree. The shot is great, if only the background wasn't so prominent.
Maybe there is something you can do in post that will put the focus more on the subject.

Nice shot though.

[Joeri?!]

ok, could you maybe explain that to me,"do something in post" ?

im pretty new to photographing

[jjohnsen]

In an program like Photoshop you could select the subject, then slightly blur everything else. It can give you an effect similar to changing the aperture on your camera. For example, in this shot see how my wife is in focus, while the background (including my daughter) is slightly out of focus? This can help direct the viewer to your subject, and make the background less obtrusive.



It's fairly simple to do on your camera, but it's also possible if you have experience in a program like Paintshop of Photoshop.

[Joeri?!]

ah ok , thanks alot
will give it a go

Question : what is the best way to select the subject? im having a hard time with the magic wand and lasso tool

[peeperita]

nice shot.....

you were asking about selecting....someone here suggested using the quick mask to me recently...(located on the left panel below all the basic tools like crop and such... at the right bottom of the panel).....set your colors to default....black foreground....white background....then using the brush tool, paint in your desired selection.....this will look translucent and red....fine tune your selection with varying sizes to your brush until you are satisfied...

there is a button directly to the left of the quick mask that will put you back to standard mode and make your selection.....

at this point i usually feather my selection to that it's not to crisp....not too much....around 3 to 5 pixels....

anyway, i had to play around with this method a few times before i got the hang of it......but, i gotta tell you.....my first attempt at it was far easier and more precise than anything i had tried previously.....

i sure hope this helps you as much as it did me.....

peeper

[marc_714]

I love the sharp stopping of the motion. The blown out sky is a killer though.
I have ruined a lot of nice shots that way too. Where I live a gray sky is around about two thirds of the year and I really understand.. I try never to have gray sky in a picture now.

[pcarfan]

A very nice shot as is, but I tried to isolate as mentioned. I did a motion blur on the backround and some aggressive but poor cloning (less than 4 weeks of PS ownership) to try to isolate the action. Saturated and ran it through Noiseware (freeware).

It shows the basic idea, but could be done better with experience.

[Joeri?!]

thanks for that little guide peeperita, it really helped me figure it out.
thats a nice edit pcarfan, nice job. how did you get the guy, ehm dont know how to call it but he has a different look then on the original and it looks awesome.
after following the steps of peeperita i gave it a little of my own twist with a radial blur, and just little bit color change, thought it looked pretty nice, this is how it turned out:


nothing great or impressive i think but still for a first time edit