How to get the 'pop'

[NicolaB]

I am frustrated with this photo as I feel it is still a bit snap shotty - although I do like it. What could I do to improve and give it depth?

[lputman]

Have you tried converting it to black and white?

[RecceDen]

I hope you don't mind but i took the liberty of editing the image above.

I upped the temp, gave it some recovery, some clarity, some vibrancy, slight 's' curve on tones, upped the saturation on blues/orange/red and sharpened the image.



Hope your not too offended that I just grabbed it and messed around with it.

I'm not an expert when it comes to PP.

RD

[MrJones]

my advice is to convert it to black and white and push the contrast to the end.

[NicolaB]

Not offended at all. Always happy to see other interpritations - that is how I am learning. I Keep hearing 'curves' mentioned and have a new book arrived on Photo Shop today, so will look that up. Thank you for you help.

I am going to try the b&w route now - but am not sure on the best conversion route...... off to look in book now the babies are in bed.

[Life in Motion]

I think your original looks pretty good...just kinda dark and saturated. but still solid image. i love the shadow cast on the sand and the reflection.

so it would depend on what your looking for in the image. but maybe another way to look at the image would be if your background was less saturated and dark, it would make the foreground pop even more and give more contrast between the two planes.

i had a play with it and just upped the midtones and then put a soft layer filter at low opacity to make the colors pop again. in my mind...the things that are really really far away should be lighter to show depth.(okay i will try to upload it later...my attachment uploader isn't working right)

like i said your original edit is good already...just several different ways you could edit an image like this

[LeeR]

Any time we can make use of complementary colors it works to our benefit. I won't go into all the physics behind it, but I can tell you that there is an energy created when you put red and green or yellow and purple next to each other. I think baby flesh and ocean blue are close enough to complementary to create this effect, so the last thing we want to do is switch to black and white. We also don't want to be increasing the contrast any as we want to keep these colors as saturated as possible and that means keeping them in the midtone range.

The problem I see is that the babies skin is so washed out that we are not getting the full force of the effect. There are several ways to fix this; a levels adjustment would be a good start, but I used Camera Raw where I could both adjust for exposure and boost the vibrancy. Vibrance is just like Saturation except that it protects skin tones. That allows me to boost the blue of the water without turning the baby orange. Here is what I got:



Did I push it too far? Maybe, I was just trying to do a quick and dirty adjustment to show you how the color contrast can work for you here.

[NicolaB]

Lee I normally prefer black and white but for this photo, I do hope to keep the colour. I like your adjustment. I go for natural, so it is REALLY good to see other versions to stretch my mind creatively (I am soooo conservative). I did a B&W to see prior to reading your post........

[NicolaB]

okay i will try to upload it later...my attachment uploader isn't working right

Fab, thank you. As far is pp is concerned, for this one I think I just pressed auto, then did a levels layer - basically all I know at this stage.

[IABoomer]

Well, as long as we're all playing along...



I did this in GIMP by doing the following steps.

-Duplicate the original image to create another layer.

-Use the channel mixer to turn the image into a B&W. I pulled down the green about 20 and pushed up the blue about 20.

-Duplicated the original image to create a third layer.

-Added a layer mask.

-Copied my B&W layer and pasted it into the layer mask.

-Made the B&W layer invisible since it wasn't going to be part of the visible image.

-Inverted the color of the layer mask.

-Set the layer blending mode to "overlay". This punched up the ocean, sky, and beach, but because the child was so white, then we inverted the colors, the mask did very little to his tone.

-Created a new layer from the visible layers (which gets my punched up color)

-Set the layer blending mode to "Grain extract" which gives me 50% gray across the image.

-Applied a 5px gaussian blur to the layer.

-Created a new layer from the visible layers, which gives me a high-pass layer. You can do the above couple steps more easily in Photoshop which has a high-pass option.

-Set the layer blending mode to "Grain merge" to give a little sharpness to the image.

-Set the visibility of the blurred duplicate layer to invisible.

-Save as JPG