Critique my portrait please

[Dusty5150]

I just got my D5000 and CS5 a couple weeks ago and am basicalyl teaching myself, trial & error style. This site has been very helpful.

I wanted to get some feedback on this portrait of my daughter as I did quite a bit of PP on it and I have no idea what I'm doing.

The exif data from the original shot:

ISO200, 1/13s, f/5.6, 55mm focal length, no flash

In camera RAW I cropped, decreased the clarity, bumped up the saturation, added a little bit of fill light and added a bit of vignetting.



Thanks in advance for your feedback!

[scootermcq]

Pretty Girl..... you must have some very steady hands to be shooting at 1/13...

To me, you have really overprocessed the image. Saturation is too high for my liking. Skin colour is off and the blue eyes bleed into the whites. Try bumping up vibrence instead, it protects skin colour while increasing vibrance elsewhere. The decreased clarity has made her face un naturally smooth and fuzzy. Look up some skin smoothing techniques on the internet and maybe leave clarity alone. If anything, I bump up clarity, as usually a sharp portrait is desired with some skin smoothing applied separately.

Really, not a bad start, just need to learn some PP technique.

*edit* as we should be trying to help you here, this is a simple down and dirty skin smoothing.

Create a duplicate layer
Apply a Gaussian blur (adjust amount to your liking)
Go to >Layers>Masking>Hide All
Use your white paint brush and now paint the blur onto the skin areas, avoid eyes, nostrils, lips, earrings, etc.

This will leave your eyes etc sharp, but apply some blur only to the areas that you have painted it on.

[NicoleScraps]

A great rule of thumb that I learned on this forum is to use a shutter speed that is 2x your focal length, when hand holding the camera.
So in your case, you are at 55mm, to get a crisp image, you should have used a shutter speed of at least 1/100, maybe even 1/125 and adjusted your other setting around that.
Keeping this rule in mind has helped me tremendously!!
Hope that helps!

[BigFuzzy]

I don't so much mind the post processing as I do the lack of sharpness. As scooter said, your shutter speed is waaay low. It's why the image is soft, especially on the eyes. You could have easily bumped the iso to 400 to help get a faster shutter speed. Plus, if possible you should have shot at wider than f/5.6 which would have also gotten you a faster shutter speed.

Also, it's a bit centered for me, but you helped it by making it a square crop, so well done.

In the end, it's not a bad shot. I'd work on getting eye contact as this "looking away" think feels a bit forced and contrived, but it's definitely a good start in your portraits and you're lucky to have a willing and pretty model.

But always, always always, nail the focus on the eyes in these sorts of photos. You should only have non in-focus eyes when you already know how to nail focus every time and you chose not to.

PS the blue of her hoodie is a bit distracting. Think of those little things while you're composing the image in your head before putting the camera to your eye.

[Photologyst]

Beautiful model. Nice try.

The first thing I noticed was the blue sclera of the eyes. Creepy. The blue from the hoodie is also picked up in her hair. The expression is one of “Oh, Dad, not another photo.” lol

I like the smoothed skin if that is the look that you want.

TFS and keep shooting.

[Dusty5150]

Exactly the feedback I needed, thanks!!

@scooter - I think I understand the proper method of skin smoothing now, thanks for the tips!

@BigFuzzy - I used the content aware fill tool in CS5 to remove the part of her hoodie that's behind her hair and see exactly what you mean. So many little things to watch for!

thanks again!