Friday, October 2, 2009
Help, I Heart Faces!
Thanks, I heart faces contributors for any guidance you can offer. This is a picture of my son thinking about Sadie, a little girl in his class that he likes. It was taken later in the afternoon on a cloudy day. I edit in photoshop elements. My camera was set at ISO 100, f-stop 5.6, no flash, 55mm focal length. I am happy I was able to save the picture from darkness, but what else could I do to brighten it up, or should I? 
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You cold make the eyes pop a little more by bringing out the whites of the eye, you could lighten the whole shot some more, I don't know what editing software you use, in photoshop I would try to edit in RAW first and then probably try curves and levels(ever so slightly). The shot is very nice, but a bit underexposed and the edit looks still a little underexposed to me, I think skin tones look better slightly overexposed, but that's just me. Great save, very nice shot I would open the aperture a bit more and increase the ISO next time.
ReplyDeleteThat is an adorable expression :). Your words about what he was thinking about made me smile.
ReplyDeleteThe reason your shot turned out underexposed is because of the camera's meter. The bright sky fooled your camera's meter into thinking you had "too much" light. This is where the recent tutorial on overexposing would come in really handy. It explains why you want the meter to tick over between 1/2 to 1 stop to correctly expose for the skin and eyes.
Editing is going to be fun on this one. In your edit you've lightened it a little, but not enough. I tried my hand at it. http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y286/NanasMama/SoucyIMG_3247edit.jpg You might have better luck with a b/w conversion on this one. http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y286/NanasMama/SoucyIMG_3247editbw.jpg
Next time, I would watch my meter and get that exposure up. I understand wanting to save this one, though. This expression must have been very fleeting. I'm still smiling about the story :).
Oh my gosh! This kid is SO cute : ) What a sweetie and what a lovely picture. I am not such a great editor so I think I would convert it to black and white now to make sure that the skin tone looked ok.
ReplyDeleteWhat a sweet picture!! I really like the moment you caught here :) I have a new computer screen and so when I look back at all my work on our old flat screen (about 5 years old) all my work is SUPER bright because the old screen was very very dark and the color was off. Thats good that you brightened up the picture, but I still think it needs to be brightened even more. It is still dark on my monitor. Were you shooting in RAW? If so, you can definitely save it. If you were shooting in jpeg, it might be harder. His skin tones are extremely orange/red as well. I think that when there is bad color noise then the best thing to do to save the picture is convert it to black and white. (That is what I have done on occasion) In fact, the last wedding post I have on my blog- the only picture in bw was one that had a little too much color noise on the faces, so I just decided to go with black and white). Hope that helps, keep up the good work! :)
ReplyDelete