Grandma

[dossymae]

This is one of the first shots I took with my new camera. I was goofing around with it and took this candid shot of my grandma. It also happens to be one of the best pictures anyone has of my 88-year-old grandmother even though the quality could be better. (She seems to not know how to smile for photos) I was disappointed with the reflection, so using my newbie photoshop skills I cloned out the reflections. I'm actually fairly impressed by the revisions. I also played around with the shadows, highlights and saturation. What do you all think?

Before:


After:

[Japaslavian]

What did you do to brighten the scene up? There seems to be a lot more noise in the re-worked image.


Oh, and how are you liking the XSi? I haven't heard much about it yet because no one I know has used one.

[dossymae]

Considering I've only had PSE for 2 weeks and my mac was out of commission for 5 days of that, I think that I had just adjusted brightness using the brightness/contrast option since I don't know any other ways to brighten. I had also noticed that there was a lot of noise and wonder what I could do to reduce it.

I really like the XSi. I was originally looking at the XTi, but since I had already spent a lot of money on SD cards for my P&S I decided to get the XSi. I was also impressed with the IS lens that came with it. The salesman kept trying to sell me on the Liveview, but I haven't yet found it useful. Coming from a P&S I actually don't have much to compare the XSi against, but so far I am really enjoying it. It's definitely easy to use and I don't have anything bad to say about it.

[bagofscraps]

Well done for getting rid of the reflection. I'm pants at doing anything like that, so I'm very impressed!

[lputman]

I think since your ISO was 800 and you subsequently cropped the photo, it brought out more noise than if it had just been brightened.