My son

[ajrunningbiking@gmail.com]

Just want to know what I could do to enhance this photo.

[kristenh]

oh, my, he's darling. too bad i don't know a thing about pping

i think it's a great shot anyway, but i'm guessing folks might know how to make the background less distracting.

[ajrunningbiking@gmail.com]

Thanks! That is actually a great idea to blur the background. Thanks

[JPick]

Adorable! have you thought about black & white except his eyes, im sure they would stand out beautifully!

[Laurenbiz]

Critique Forum Rules

[SusanH1970]

Originally Posted by JPick

Adorable! have you thought about black & white except his eyes, im sure they would stand out beautifully!

I have to disagree with that. I'm not a fan of selective color, but that's just my opinion.

To the OP: Can you post your EXIF, per the critique forum guidelines?

As was mentioned, the background is a bit distracting, but not so much as the photo being out of focus. The focus fell on the brim of his hat, the rest of his face is totally out of focus.

You did a good job of handling the lighting, though. It appears you were in dappled light and the dappling is hitting his hat rather than his face. His face is evenly lit without being too flat and you've got really nice light in his eyes.

Compositionally, he's dead-center, which makes for a bit of a boring image (not trying to be harsh at all!). Try re-shooting so his eyes are in the top third of the frame next time. Here's some info on the rule of thirds.

Hope this helps. Your lighting isn't bad at all, your white balance looks good, and you've got great eye contact and connection. You are definitely off to a great start. Work on focusing on the eyes, watching your backgrounds, and composition.

He's way too cute, by the way, I just wanna hug him!

[mcanseco]

aj I hope you don't mind...I did a quick cut and blur of the background, a little sharpening, and vignette.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...chmentcopy.jpg

[edbayani]

beautiful shot of you son. but background is distracting and focus is on the hat. the eyes are a bit soft.
you can select your son's image by using quickmask and brush your son with and when you come to the edges vary your brush hardness according to the edge. when completely covered, exit quick mask and inverse th selection to select the background. you can apply gaussian blur or if you want, before blurring, press Q to enter quckmask again and with a large soft brush, set to 30%, brush with white the bottom part of the mask to erase it a bit and exit quick mask so when you apply gaussian blur, the top most part will be blurred and the bottom only slightly. you can also select the eyes and put it on another layer and apply high pass filter with a radius of three, then set the blending mode to overlay to sharpen and increase contrast a bit. flatten
attached sample.

[ajrunningbiking@gmail.com]

The sharpening helped the focus issue for sure. I am biased, but the hair makes the picture.