My Son, Before & After

[shauncunninghamphoto]

Before



After



EXIF Data
Camera Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
Exposure 1/800
Aperture f/3.2
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 200
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program Aperture-priority AE

I took this photo of my son last weekend. Here's my before and after process:-

The Shot:-

1. It was a clear, bright (sunny) day
2. He was sat on the grass by a creek in a large acerage
3. I used a Canon 50mm, f/1.8 portrait lens ("nifty fifty").
4. The sun was high and subject left
5. I used a bounce disc (diffuser side) for fill, positioned low and subject right (facing against the sun), to soften the light on the face and to create a reflection in the eyes. (I took multiple shots until I got my desired amount of fill and reflection)
6. I took the shot in RAW

Processing:-

1. I imported into Lightroom 3
2. I cropped the image to acheive a more dramatic composition. In doing so, I also managed to remove the 2 distracting trees on the left side of the photo while keeping the tree in the right hand side
3. I used the Lightroom 3 antique grayscale preset as the baseline adjustment
4. I made subtle adjustments to fill, recovery, blacks and highlights to correct lighting issues introduced by the antique grayscale preset
5. I slightly adjusted clarity (about -10)
6. I increased yellow saturation by +10 and luminance by a similar amount
7. I used the adjutment brush for iris enhancement and added back in some blue color (my son's natural eye color) that was removed by the grayscale preset
8. I increased the exposure of his eyes by +1 and increased brightness by a similar amount.
9. Having developed the photo in Lightroom, I made all retouching edits in Portrait Professional 10 Studio (using it as a plugin to Lightroom 3).
10. In PP10, I removed moles, softened the skin and made other minor cosmetic adjustments
11. I saved the PP10 edit and dropped back into Lightroom 3 and then exported the final photo.

Hope you like it. All constructive criticism welcomed....

Thanks for looking/reading.

Shaun

[bmayfield]

Nice! I am not a big fan of selective coloring, but this is very subtle. Lovely conversion in my opinion.

[shauncunninghamphoto]

Originally Posted by bmayfield

Nice! I am not a big fan of selective coloring, but this is very subtle. Lovely conversion in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback - much appreciated!

[mshockley]

This looks good! I bet he thinks it's cool? I really like the conversion and coloring you did, especially how his eyes look.

[klr]

I definitely like the crop better!

[gturner]

I like it in the main, but it looks pretty green on my screen. Is this correct?

[shauncunninghamphoto]

@Michelle: Thanks for taking the time to comment. Glad you like it...and yes, he loved it but not as much as his mom ;-)

@Kay: Thanks for commenting too!

@gturner: Mm. Interesting. On my iMac, it has a faithfull antique cast (subtle brown/yellow). However, on my Dell laptop, the cast does have a hint of green. On my HP ProBook it is generally chromatic without any yellow/brown/green cast at all. I could start a whole new thread on color management and monitor calibration and still be confused at the end of it! My prints are faithfull to my iMac monitor so I'm happy.