What Would You Do (#19)

[Nicole]

Another week, and yeah, ok, it's Wednesday... bu tit's still Tuesday somewhere

This week we have a picture from shannonje that was posted previously in the critique my shot section. Shannon said:

I am particularly interested in color correction, making the boy feeding the pigeons from his lips pop, and somehow make the out of focus boy and super sharp mom work for the photo...

So, here's the picture:


Available Larger

While there is a specific request for this picture, still feel free to do what you would like to the photo since this is "What Would You Do". So, once you've done your edit, come post it back here and tell us what you did so we can all learn from it.

If you want your photo to be the subject of one of these threads, drop me a PM with a link to the medium and large size of the image and I'll use them in the order that I get them. Photos can be of pretty much anything, so flowers, people, landscapes, we can do edits.

Now, let's see what you would do!

And don't forget, next week is week 20 Nothing particularly significant, but we'll call it the first milestone on our way to WWYD (#100)

[Nicole]

Not a particularly creative edit, more in line with what was asked for (I hope!)



So, what I did first was use the Velvia trick to enhance the colours. Then I adjusted the image using a "lighter curve". I used the smart sharpening to bring out some details, and finally I used the selection brush to select around the two people and applied a Gaussean Blur to the background.

[cjbnc]

I've been studying composition lately, so this edit is mostly practice at cropping.


Cropping: Boy is the main subject, most of the woman cropped out to lessen her importance, which gives the picture more of a feel of looking over her shoulder at what she's focused on. Angle was selected to give the picture more flow, and place the pigeon kiss on one hotspot, the camera in foreground on the other. Woman's camera arm forms another nice diagonal that seems to add to the flow.

After cropping:
- duplicate layer, mask out main subjects. Play with Gaussian blur to find an amount that doesn't look too artificial, and doesn't blur out the architectural lines in the background.
- add curves layer. click auto to fix per-channel ranges, then use midtone eyedropper to fix whitebalance off a gray spot on woman's shirt. Also brightened the main curve a little.
- add hue/saturation layer, saturation +15 seems to give it enough color without looking artificial (to my eye, anyway)

[Drax]

I just did what i wanted to do since some time now... Polaroids from a single image. A friend of mine explained this to me some weeks ago.

I duplicated backgrounds, added layers and filling them with black, Created clipping mask, added some borders, a drop shadow layer style, rotated at will, and at last duplicated layer groups.

Lager image link

[speednut]

Here's my take on the photo. I'm personally always fighting clutter in my photos and trying to simplify them. In the photo having the focus sharp on the photographer and not the boy is a big issue to me. I decided to remove the Mom photographer as she didn't add to the story IMHO. I find the boy playing with the birds far more interesting.


Steps I did:
1. Adjusted the levels as per this tutorial.
2. Removed photographer's arm and replaced it with birds from far left bottom of the original photo. Corrected with rubber stamp tool.
3. Cropped to recompose.
4. Used "smart sharpen" to get the blurry boy as sharp as possible. (amount=80%, Radius 2.5 pixels)
5. Changed your lens aperture. Entered quick mask mode and did my best to paint the boy and the birds; still not happy with the selection I did around the lower bird on the boy's arm. Once the boy and birds were painted in red, I applied a gradient fill on the lower half of the photo to paint the bottom portion in red and fading (transparent) once it reached the stroller. Exit quick mask mode. I then used the Blur -> lens blur filter to make the background blur, yet keep the boy and the birds on the ground unchanged. (shape=6, radius=38, else=defaults) Mask looked like:

6. Wanted to get the bird closest to the boy's mouth more prominent, but it's mostly in the shadows. Adjusted the gamma via levels adjustment layer and unmasked only around the highlights on boy's face and on the bird. (midtone input level = 1.16)
7. Bumped up the saturation a small amount. (+10)

voilà

[Teewinot]

All of you guys did a great job getting the subject to pop out! I decided to just do more of a fancy black and white conversion.



What I did:
-Cropped tightly around subject
-Cloned out mom's arm
-Curves adjustment (brightened)
-Unsharp mask (radius 75, strength 30) twice
-Duplicated layer
-Gaussian blur of duplicated layer
-Overlay blend at 100%
-Flattened 2 layers
-Reduced saturation 90%
-Adjusted color balance (added some yellow, a little red)
-Sharpened a couple of areas (face and hands)
-Added borders

Nothing too imaginative from me this week, but at least I got some more practice with b&w conversion.

[winterminute]

Originally Posted by Drax

I just did what i wanted to do since some time now... Polaroids from a single image. A friend of mine explained this to me some weeks ago.

'

Was this a complete manual process or was their a photoshop action or something that makes this an easy task? Do you have a link to a detailed tutorial?

[Drax]

This is a complete manual process.
My man send me this link:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p...cts/polaroids/

i just discovered that the site is full of tutos. Enjoy!

[peeperita]

i can't say what i did was so radically different than any other take on this, but, here goes....



about all i did, other than the crop to my liking, was to take the background, desaturate it, apply a blur and then set it to color overlay mode...

i love this exercise because it makes me stretch a little....

thanks for the opportunity....

peeper

[shannonje]

I forgot that i had a photo coming up and totally missed this. Thank you to everyone who contributed. cjbnc - i love the way you cropped this - wow, it really had an impact on the shot. thank you. and teewinot - I love the black and white. It looks really great framed on its own like that. Thank you everyone!