Concert Pic... Help...

[Griggs]

Ok, so I've been to 2 concerts and taken over 400 pictures and I've only got a handful that I like. The main problem I think is my camera not taking a quality photo in the concert lighting, but here is one that is pretty good.

One problem I see is if you look at his right forearm, its distorted a bit.

I'm going to crop, overlay, and delete that stuff in the middle background. Other than that, I'm not sure what else to do to improve the pic.


Heres a big one if anybody wants to play with it

[wulf]

Distorted? What I see is a touch of blur along with less than smooth blending between the colours as the camera tries to create some sort of image out of the limited information available.

Could you tell us a bit more about the set up used - camera, lens, settings?

Wulf

[Griggs]

Heh, ok, yea, thats what I'm talking about. My camera has a difficult time not getting noise and stuff like that in a picture that is taken in low light.

That was from a Panasonic Lumix FZ7. I can't remember the exact settings, but the ISO was somewhere around 100-200, shutter speed was somewhere around 1/40, the ap was around F2.8 (I had that on auto, so not exactly sure) Cont.AF ON (whatever that means) It made the color look a little more natural though.

[Griggs]

Heres what I've got so far...


click here for full size

[jdepould]

The distortion looks like a de-noising artifact. Point & Shoots just don't fare well in those kinds of situations.

[vauxspeed]

To me his right forearm looks like the shadow of the mic stand and picks duplicated because of multiple light sources and a bit of motion blur. I think it looks fine as you've captured the action of him playing the guitar

[Olivier H]

I personnaly don't see any geometric distortion. I would tend to confirm that the posterization effect comes from the denoizing filtering.
I like the composition with the cropping.

[WooD]

Panasonic DMC-FZ
f/3.3
1/40 sec
ISO 200
+.0.3 exposure
30mm
shutter priority

Considering what you had to work with, I think you pulled off a pretty good shot. I bet you could fix up the color of the arm in one of the many post processing programs.

[Griggs]

Thanks. I realize I should have a DSLR for these shots, but I don't. I'm amazed at the sort of shots I see on here and wish I would've just saved a bit more and bought one.

WooD, how did you get all that information? And what do you recommend I do with the color? I used the dup layer, blur, overlay, opacity to bump up the color a bit, but I don't know how to fix the color on his arm.

Theres a little bit of noise, if you look closley there are some purples and other colors that aren't suppose to be there, does anybody have a program or something to get rid of noise, would that help?

Also, the background of the original photo was pretty black, but does anybody think it "looks" like I deleted the background. If so, does anybody have some advice on how I can lighten that effect.

Thanks.

[jiminyClickit]

Griggs,

You can fix this. For a closer crop, move the mic closer. This crop is the size of a CD case.

The arm can be gradually selected and lightened in those shadow areas until the colors are close, then some smudging will simulate original skin. Face shadow is lightened, red neck is desaturated, left arm green shadow reduced. You could introduce a numbere of slightly lighter areas in background, but the black will serve as is, especially at a smaller size.