1 Month Old

[IlluminatingPhoto]

My little guy was 1 month old last weekend and I took a couple shots. Here is one that I liked. I am working hard to improve my pictures and have them have the professional look. I know that I am not there yet but am striving to get there.

Would you tell me if you like the composition and how you would improve it?
What do you think is missing for that professional picture?
The lighting was from a large window in the morning and there was no flash used.

Thank you very much. I learn so much from all your comments and help.



Exposure: 1/80
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 400
Exposure Bias: -1/3 EV (Highlight priority on the camera)

[SusanH1970]

What a sweetie.

Compositionally it's not bad, but it does seem very underexposed to me, and the conversion is looking really muddy. Do you have a SOOC that you can post?

[IlluminatingPhoto]

Thanks for the reply.

I do have a SOOC at home so I will have to post that later this evening. It may be under exposed. I don't have my monitor calibrator because it is in storage.

Thanks again.

[IlluminatingPhoto]

Here is the SOOC. I used OnOne to soften the skin because of the pimples and complete the black and white conversion.

Let me know what you think. Is the composition good enough to move over to the post processing section and learn some more about that side?

Thanks again.

[zona5101]

cutie!
Your sooc shot is better. I concur (ooh I am sooo highbrow) with Susan, your conversion is muddy and contrasty. It made the lil fellas skin look splotchy. Work to extend the tonal range on your conversion...

[IlluminatingPhoto]

The more I look at the pictures I see that the SOOC looks better. I struggle with wanting to create something better with Photoshop but most of the time end up making the pictures muddy.

Anyone care to share how they would convert this picture to black and white?

Thanks again for all the help.

[SusanH1970]

Originally Posted by IlluminatingPhoto

The more I look at the pictures I see that the SOOC looks better. I struggle with wanting to create something better with Photoshop but most of the time end up making the pictures muddy.

Anyone care to share how they would convert this picture to black and white?

Thanks again for all the help.

Mind if I have a play with a conversion? I'll tell you what I did.

[IlluminatingPhoto]

Please have at it.

I am very interested in better ways to convert to black and white.

[SusanH1970]

Thanks for letting me play! Working with a small image size it's not perfect, but here's what I did (I know it looks like a lot but I wanted to explain it in detail - it took me about five minutes. )

1. Opened in ACR and bumped exposure, saved as .dng.
2. Opened .dng in CS2.
3. Spot healing brush on baby acne.
4. Duplicate layer, lasso eyes, new layer via copy, set blending mode to screen at 50% opacity.
5. Soft eraser set to black over erase the screen blending from the lassoed areas except for the eyeballs.
6. Flatten.
7. Duplicate layer again, image - adjustments - hue/saturation - select blue, reduce saturation to -100 to pull the blue cast out of the blanket. It didn't affect baby's skin because there was no blue in it, but I erased over the eyes because it did pull the blue out of baby's eyes.
8. Flatten.
9. Cloned blanket at top edge.
10. Crop.
11. Image - adjustments - gradient map (foreground set to black, background set to white).
12. Levels - black slider to right just a touch to add contrast, middle slider to left a bit to brighten midtones. You can also use curves for more fine-tuning, but for a quick play I used levels.

Like I said, still not perfect, but I just wanted to show you a quick play. I hope you like it.

ETA: Ooooh, now when I see it uploaded here, the eyes look a bit much - accidentally clipped the blacks.

[IlluminatingPhoto]

I am always impressed at the talent in this forum.

I can also see that I have much to learn. Your rendering is much closer to what I "saw" when I started in Photoshop.

Thanks so much.