What went wrong?

[gstettner]

I took this photo of my daughter last summer. It looked terribly cute at the time, but as one looks at it now, the brilliance of the background makes her look . . . well, less than brilliant. What might I have done differently at the time, and what might I do now in Photoshop to enhance the picture? At the time, I was using an old Minolta Dimage F100, so my options were somewhat limited.

I'm grateful in advance for your helpful suggestions.

gstettner

[Nicole]

For now:
You can fix this in Photoshop if you take the time to do all the fiddly work I'm not particularly good at it though, so someone may have better solutions than me. What I tried was using layers to lighten up your daughter. So I duplicated the original picture into a new layer and set it to screen. This lightens up the skin, but it makes the background too light. So it's up to you how you want to fix the background. What I did was erase the background on the second layer which let the original background colours show through, which actually makes a really nice shot if you're willing to work with the picture for a while. I think it could be a really worthwhile endeavour.

For the future:
In this sort of situation, even though it seems counter-intuitive, try using a diffused flash (you can spend money on a diffuser or make one yourself). The diffuser will stop the dear-in-headlights look that people seem to get. But it will light up the skin better.

Very cute shot though

[benttop]

Originally Posted by gstettner

I took this photo of my daughter last summer. It looked terribly cute at the time, but as one looks at it now, the brilliance of the background makes her look . . . well, less than brilliant. What might I have done differently at the time, and what might I do now in Photoshop to enhance the picture? At the time, I was using an old Minolta Dimage F100, so my options were somewhat limited.

I'm grateful in advance for your helpful suggestions.

gstettner

I hope you don't mind a quick edit. With my grandkids, I often find myself outside without my flash and the sun is bright. I've developed a technique that works really great with RAW files, but even with JPG you can see the potential. Here's the edit:



The trick is that the face is a long way from the bright background in terms of luminosity, so what I do is change the contrast to get the face and the background closer, then boost the saturation a lot to try to get the colors to provide the contrast. It doesn't always work very well, but sometimes it pulls a face right out of the shadows. In this particular image, I think I could have really improved it better if I had a RAW file to work from, but you can see that what little I was able to do really changed the image. The problem with doing this technique in JPG is that the saturation is very prone to blowing out the reds, so you really have to be fussy with the slider, and go back and forth. The ideal way to do that is to create an adjustment layer for levels (to do the contrast adjustment) and an adjustment layer for Hue/Saturation. Then you can go back and forth, feathering the controls until it looks right. I only spent a minute on this one, but I think this method could help with a bit more time fiddling with the full size image, especially if it was in RAW.

Oh, by the way, your daughter is beautiful!

[smc1377]

Good stuff Benttop. Never thought to do it that way. Will have to give this a try next time the opportunity arises.

[Triglav]

Nicely done benttop..I use shadow/highlight in these circusmtances (image>adjustments>shadow/highlight). Select roughly the girl with lassotool (feather at 100pixels) and lighten it. This can also be done with Image>apply image and the select screen and reduce the percentage to whatever you like. 15 or 20% is in most case enough.

Next thing is I would select the background and try to darken it a bit. It is still very harsh in the photo that benttop edited.

Ok, did this all without having PS here at work, so forgive me if I did not get the path to the tools correct.

[wulf]

Here's my take on it:



It has come out very similar to benttop's, although I've used a slightly different technique. I duplicated the layer, desaturated the colours and then inverted the monochrome picture so it looked like a monochrome negative. The negative layer was then switched into overlay mode, blurred by about 20px and made translucent.

The result of all this is that the range of values is reduced; by using a mask, the result is quite sympathetic to the original image. I also did a little more work on hue and saturation.

The technique didn't work as well here as it has on some other pictures - it tends to be more effective where the picture starts out with higher contrast - but, although it sounds like a lot of steps, it is actually quite straightforward.

Apart from the lighting it is a really good portrait - if you can get a similar set up, but maybe with something to act as a reflector and put more light on the girls face, you could probably get an even better result.

Wulf

[hsroxas]

Nothing really went wrong.
Since the lovely face occupies most of the frame and is the focus point, the camera must have metered the face rendering the background a bit over exposed.
The suggestion on the use of a reflector will normally provide better skin tones and the use of a diffused flash may provide a balanced light between the subject and the background. Some call this "fill in" flash. This is a lighting style, I am extremely fond of specially during travel, where I put equal emphasis on both the main subject and the background. When shooting where the light source is coming from the back of my main subject, I find that underexposing the camera's reading anywhere from 1 to 2 f stops whilst using flash normally gives me a good light balance.

[jiminyClickit]

gstettner,

Hope these are helping, and that you'll be ready for the next smile.



If you want a little drama for this one, this is not PhotoShop, but the principles are similar:

- Add a layer that you can darken out to edges. The face is thus emphasized.
- Trace around the iris; contrast, saturate, lighten, whatever you need to bring them out.

That's it, she's the center of attention.

[jrossh21]

I hope it's OK to re-edit your photo ... I went for a different approach once I got it into Photoshop and had the chance to mess with it a little.



What I did was created a duplicate layer, extracted (Filter>Extract) her from the background, adjusted the channel mixer (Image>Adjustment>Channel Mixer) to convert the background to B&W. I then adjusted the Shadows/Highlights (Image>Mode>Shadows/Highlights (maybe Highlights/Shadows)) to darken the background a little, then the same on her to lighten her, then adjusted a little the color balance (Image>Mode>Color Balance) slightly on her.

[jiminyClickit]

jrossh21,

I can't get hair to look as natural as this, even with SmartSelect. This is good, sort of in the watercolor area.