What’s Your Preference?

bullychk04 · #1 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 09:04 PM

Woo hoo! So I'm finally posting a shot of someone OTHER than my son

This was from a 1st Birthday shoot I did back on Memorial Day weekend. I've been really working on focusing on the eyes. So I guess my question is do you think I got it in this? What about composition? Since he was sitting under a trellis with two rows of beautiful daylilies next to him, I figured rule of thirds may look a little weird here. Although now that I'm looking at it, he looks a little off center anyway.

EXIF Data:
Camera: D3100
Aperture: f/2
ISO: 100
SS: 1/125

SusanH1970 · #2 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 09:20 PM

Hi Kelly.

He's a cutie! I looked at the large image on Flickr, and to me it seems the focus actually fell on his left ear. I'm sure he was wiggling quite a bit so that's most likely why. I'm not familiar with Nikon, but I know that on Canon I keep it in One Shot AF so it won't shoot unless focus is locked, and I make sure I lock it on the eyes.

As for composition, with the ROT it doesn't mean that he has to be on one side or the other. Think of a grid over your photo - his eyes are more or less on the top third line of that grid. I'd actually crop it in a tad tighter on the right to center his body a tad more.

GREAT job with the leading lines and framing!

One nitpick - the colors seem to be a tad nuclear, lol, and even his skin tones have been affected - he's a tad orange and he's got purple shadows on his legs. I'd drop the saturation to keep things more natural. Usually just a bit of contrast is all that's needed to make the colors pop, and there are loads of ways to do that (and you want to mask back in the skin tones to keep them from turning funny colors).

ETA: I did a little tutorial on how I edit to get rich colors while keeping skin tones natural here. HTH!

bullychk04 · #3 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 09:56 PM

Thanks so much Susan! I'll have to play around with it a bit more on his skin tones. As far as the Imagenomic Portrait plugin, is that something you do to all of your portraits?

SusanH1970 · #4 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 10:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bullychk04

Thanks so much Susan! I'll have to play around with it a bit more on his skin tones. As far as the Imagenomic Portrait plugin, is that something you do to all of your portraits?

Not all. Just on ones I feel need it. And as I said in the tutorial, always at a super-low threshold, and I lower the opacity way down - it's a very powerful plug-in, even on its lowest smoothing level. I forgot if I mentioned it in the tutorial, but I also always mask lips, eyes and hair back in after running it.

If you post a SOOC, I'd love to have a play with it, if you don't mind.

bullychk04 · #5 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 10:13 PM

Not at all! Thank you!

SusanH1970 · #6 (**permalink**) 06-23-2011, 11:03 PM

Thanks for letting me play! This is a good, solid image to start with - well done!

I brought it into ACR and "opened as" a RAW file and bumped the exposure, used the recovery slider to bring back as much of the blown areas as I could (the spot behind his head is making me a bit batty, but that's a nitpick). I also warmed it up using the temperature slider.

I did a little more than I usually do - this was fun to play with! I did a levels adjustment layer set to luminosity and darkened the blacks and brightened the midtones. I duplicated the layer, set to multiply, lowered the opacity and masked him back in. Did the same for a soft light layer and a color burn layer. Multiply was at about 40, soft light at about 30, and color burn was at 10. I used the measure tool to straighten the image and cropped. Lastly, I burned the background's midtones and shadows at 8%, then ran a resize and sharpen for web action that I have. Sounds like a lot, but it took about 5 minutes.

Hope you like it!