First Critique Request - Portrait

[srosenus]

So, I am very new to photography (I started really learning about everything a week ago via internet) and wanted to see what others had to say about my first favorite shot that I took. It's only my favorite because it was the first time I captured a "moment" of my son that looked natural. It has many flaws I know. I took this picture at night and there wasn't much light but I think I brought in as much light as I could and then feel that I was successful at the editing. Let me know what I could do composition/editing-wise to improve this shot. Thank you!

Model Canon EOS REBEL T1i
ISO 3200
Exposure 1/25 sec
Aperture 5.0
Focal Length 28mm
Flash Used false
Exposure Bias 0.0

[Madog]

What was the light source for this pic? Looks a bit yellow to me.
I know your lighting was dim but for some reason the shadow between his face and (camera) left ear bothers me; maybe the ear seems detached from his head.

[srosenus]

Yea, the lighting was just my porch light outside...so really bad lighting. Here is the original before my edits. I completely changed the coloring in the edit, but I thought it added to the picture...maybe not? Let me know what you would have done with the original to salvage the bad lighting issue if you could. Thanks.

[IMG][/IMG]

[homank76]

What do you have for editing software? Do you shoot RAW or JPEG?

[srosenus]

This was JPEG. And I am new to this, so I just used Picnik since it seemed like a good starting point.

[homank76]

I understand that you just started, but I recommend shooting in RAW as you have a lot more room to make changes to the photo in post editing. Shooting JPEG the camera does most of the processing for you and its hard to make changes.

[srosenus]

Ok, I can start doing that. So what would you do to it to make it better? I understand if it's RAW I could manipulate it better, but what kind of manipulation to it?

[homank76]

White balance, sharpness, noise, color, saturation, vibrance....

Now did your camera come with software to convert RAW to JPEG when done editing? If not, Canon should have some you can download from their website.

[Madog]

Given the circumstances you did pretty well with the edit. Shooting at high iso with the image underexposed can be hard to recover, high iso gives more noise. Underexposure pushes your image info closer to the level of the noise making it harder to separate the two.
I had a go with your original, fixed white balance ( I think), added 2 stops exposure, mostly desaturated orange to kill the funky cast, a fair bit of noise reduction, cropped to 4x5 in a vertical to have more space on the side his eyes were looking.
IMG_8693.jpg

[srosenus]

Madog, thank you for the critique and for the edit w/ description. It gives me hopethat as I learn editing, I can try to salvage shots if I make big mistakes like with this pic. I would also like to minimize these mistakes obviously . So at night, what iso and shutterspeed do u recommend? Iwas having a lot of troubles with that. The aperture and focus I feel I understand well, but the right settings for lighting are definitely giving me troubles.