bride for a day

[deadgirlreading]

I was shooting at a special needs preschool and I want to make the photos look as beautiful as possible for the parents. A lot of them don't have any good photos of their children. If you have any suggestions/alternate edits, I am open to suggestions.

In the mean time, I decided I wanted to make her look as beautiful as a bride on her wedding day.


I followed the high-key black and white tutorial here and then added a pink layer, set to soft light with 30% opacity to give it a slight tint.


Once again, I am open to suggestions and constructive criticism but please be nice.

[foxor]

That's a really nice gesture, getting parents such photos. I definitely love that the B&W makes the background sort of disappear but I do have some suggestions. I find the ribbon in her eyes a little distracting to begin with, but after converting to black and white it seems to have become overexposed which makes it MUCH more distracting to me. I would try to preserve a bit more of the detail there. Nice effect with the pink tint. Something you might want to consider too, what I've seen recently in some wedding pictures that I really like, is when they do an effect similar to what you have done, but do not completely remove the colour (I'm assuming this could be done by adding back the original on a new layer with reduced opacity, and possibly changing the blending mode).

[deadgirlreading]

Thanks so much for your help. I'm going to try that.
It's really hard to get a good shot of this particular subject because she's in a wheelchair and can't really do very much for herself.

Is this any better?

I know the bow is still in the way but is it less annoying now that it's not overexposed?

[Ciscley]

Of the three, I still like the B&W best. It has such a sweet softness to it. But the color saturation in the third is fun too. It reminds me of the classic print photos in everyone's childhood albums.

Foxor's suggestion about adding back in just a little of the original photo's color reminded me of this thread I read recently. There are really nice instructions in it about how to selectively add color.

My before and after [selective colour]

[deadgirlreading]

Thanks for your input.
I would love to do selective color but this shot doesn't really have anything colorful enough to make pop. :[

[kencaleno]

may i suggest adding slight contrast,larger catchlight in the eyes and soft focus effect?

[deadgirlreading]

I'm not quite sure about the larger catchlights but I like the soft focus. Thank you for your help.

[ressalg]

I've got a couple of ideas that, with your permission, I'd like to try. I'm fairly new to the PP side of photography but I'm more than willing to give it a try. If it's ok to rework your original, I'll post it to your thread when I'm done.

Thanks,
Rob

[lezleelliott]

just thought i'd take a look at it, grabbed your original post and played around in photoshop.
post processing:
grayscale
adjust curves/levels for contrast
crop sides to take out white streak on left and chair reflection on right
burn out background wall on left
dodge face and veil
added new layer for painted in color on bow
added "high pass" layer for sharpness, masked out areas like hair
added gaussian blur layer, masked for "d.o.p." effect, leaving face in focus

that's pretty much it... alot of it just depends on what you want the photo to turn out like...
[IMG][/IMG]

[Cuchulainn]

... a little diffusion, some skin softening, a little desaturation... cleaned up the background a little .. brightened the teeth and whites of the eyes.