How I Dealt with Smoke at At a Concert

[swiftmed]

Hey Guys,

I have been doing a lot of concert photography of late, and I think Im getting better at it but I would just like your opinion on this specific image. I asked the band If I could take a picture before they started their set, and they agreed.

There was a full audience waiting behind me, so I had to be quick - it was literally one shot, thats it. Unfortunately for me, the lighting guy let out a ton of smoke before the picture was taken so I thought my picture was completely ruined.

After taking some advice, people said I should convert to B+W, play with contrast, brightness etc and see what I can get out of it. I have posted before and after pictures below.

What I would like critique on is Not composition or anything like that, but my before and after result. What would you do, what advice can you give, did I do anything wrong were I might improve future images like this?

Many thanks.





ISO: 400
Focal: 18mm
Aperture: f/3.5
Shutter: 1/50

[IABoomer]

A couple of things I notice here. The lead singer's face looks a little hot, like there might be some clipped areas. The blacks look really thick which causes some floating head illusions. Finally, I'm guessing you selectively brightened up the drummer. There appears to be a halo around his head.

I'd suggest pulling back a little on the extremes of the edit. A little haze might not be a bad thing. It gives the black shirts a little more texture and represents the club environment.

I know you weren't specifically asking about composition, but a slight shift to the left to avoid cutting off the elbow would help, IMHO.

[swiftmed]

Hi there,

Thank you for the feedback. I did do quite a lot to this image as you mentioned. A lot of blurring the background, some clipping and I actually selectively brightened up all four members of the group - just their heads. I think I went a little too far on the lead singers face (brighter than the others), and I think I applied the brightening a little too wide on the drummer, as you mentioned.

I really wasn't keen on the smoke, hence having done quite a lot to remove it's presence, but your suggestion that I maybe pull back a little with the darkness is definitely something Ill try out. Thanks again. I appreciate it.

[Tito87]

I like the first image a whole lot more. I do not find pleasing to the eye what you did with your editing. I'm sorry, but I think you went way too far.

[swiftmed]

Thank you for your opinion. I am still very new to editing, so maybe Im still making the mistakes that I hear a lot of newbies make... going too far with the editing/effects.

What I appreciate though is when people tell me when I've gone too far, and how they would have done it. Thats how I like to learn. Thats why I love this site.

[Tito87]

Originally Posted by swiftmed

Thank you for your opinion. I am still very new to editing, so maybe Im still making the mistakes that I hear a lot of newbies make... going too far with the editing/effects.

What I appreciate though is when people tell me when I've gone too far, and how they would have done it. Thats how I like to learn. Thats why I love this site.

I am very new to digital editing as well, so please, take my opinion for what is worth and with a grain of salt. To start with, you said that your picture was ruined by the smoke-- I didn't see it that way: the smoke was part of what was happening when you took the picture. You were taking pictures of a band at a concert hall, they were not studio shots-- and the picture doesn't look that bad, it looks a lot better than the B&W version. Now, moving into PP, I would've played a little with levels or curves to see if I could get a nice contrast and I would've kept an eye open for hot spots.
That's just off the top of my head, but as I said, I'm extremely new to digital editing-- feel free to disregard my comment.

[kcoppock]

Hope you don't mind, I took a stab at touching it up a bit. I still think it ends up better as a black and white image, but the smoke doesn't show up at all after a bit of editing. As always, just let me know if I should take it down.

So I just used a multitude of adjustments layers for this version -- six, to be exact. First, I added a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, with contrast upped to 100. This still wasn't enough for me, so I duplicated this B/C layer again, that got me pretty satisfactory results out of it. It had some weird shadow artifacts after that, so I added a curves layer that adjusted the contrast just a bit to dampen the effect. Then, I added a Black and White adjustment layer, and just adjusted to taste. Then I added one more B/C layer to finalize the tones. Finally, I added one particular levels adjustment to correct for the drummer in the background. Masked it out completely except for his face and neck.

[ttosifa]

Originally Posted by swiftmed

There was a full audience waiting behind me, so I had to be quick - it was literally one shot, thats it. Unfortunately for me, the lighting guy let out a ton of smoke before the picture was taken so I thought my picture was completely ruined.

Not sure exactly what you are trying to do here. The smoke reduces contrast. Many other things reduce contrast too, such as forgetting the lens hood or condensation on the lens. Whenever you are in such a situation, sometimes Apply Image in PS with Multiply mode can help. Here is an alternate color version of your photo with the Apply Image Multiply mode used with the RGB channel. I didn't spend a lot of time finding the best combinations of channels. I think maybe the green is over-represented here (see the bass player's guitar), but I think this is also true in the BW renditions presented so far. This is just a version to remove the lost contrast due to the smoke -- it needs further processing to correct for poor lighting on the bass player and the drummer (just like in the BW versions), as well as other exposure issues -- the singers arm is almost correctly exposed, but none of the faces are. Look at it as a color version with the smoke effect minimized, not a final product.

[swiftmed]

Wow. Thanks everybody.

@Tito87 - Thanks a lot for your input. For me, I like to receive feedback from as many people as possible, whether they are newbies or full on experts. It's what their opinion on the image is, not their expertise level that interests me.

@Kevin - I really like what you did with the image. This is exactly how I should have wanted the image to come out like... whether its because Im new to editing (and pretty new to photography), or because I simply didn't know when 'enough was enough' on the effects/editing, I completely missed the mark, so thank you for showing me how my Image 'should' have looked.

@Ttosifa - Thanks also to you for your input. If truth be told, I prefer the image as a black and white version, but I appreciate you explaining how you went about cleaning up the image if I wanted to keep it as a colour version. I honestly thought the image was a write-off in colour because of the smoke, I didn't know where to even begin on cleaning it up, I just headed straight to black and white because - it was the only way I knew how to salvage it, so thank you for showing me!!

Cheers folks.

[swiftmed]

Hey Guys,

I finally had a bit of time to go back and re-edit this picture today and I'm posting my results for further critique of these new changes.

This time though, Instead of relying on presets and plugins to automatically edit my picture how it saw fit, I decided to do all the adjustments myself. It was done in Aperture, and I mainly made use of the contrast, colour, vibrancy and highlights / shadows sliders.

What do you think of this new version?