revisit of a wedding portrait

[3ntreri]

So after reading the recent article here talking about proper framing for portraits and not leaving too much room above the subject's head.

With that in mind, and armed with the crop tool, I did a quick re-visit of some of the shots I took while at a friend's wedding in Thailand:

The first is the original, unedited JPG straight from the camera [updated - did the same PP as the 2nd one]; I had previously skipped past this shot when I was doing my editing. The 2nd shot is a cropped and edited from the original RAW.

Original [edited]:


Cropped & Edited:


I wish there had been a way to save more of the sky

Any ideas or alternate edits?

[zona5101]

The cropped shot is very nice. a big improvement. You might try and burn the sky down a bit, it might pull back some of the detail and also lower the brightness of the sun...

[Marija]

I like both of them and with that said I would like to see the first one edited.
Also, what zona5101 said, lower the brightens of the sun.

[Peely22]

The second, without question,
although I'd lower the warmth of the skintones if you can. looks slightly too artificial.
the dress is well captured btw, v nice.

[3ntreri]

So I've re-uploaded the original. I did the same processing as the cropped version, though I may have brought out a little too much blue at the top - can you see the gradient?

I experimented with burning out the sun a bit but couldn't come up with a process that looked natural - any tips?