My get pushed challenge this week from Garasimos @gerry13 was to do some portraits. Good timing as dh and I ended up spending the week with the babies. What a blessing it has been! This is from our trip to the park Thursday evening.
This is the local park that has been here forever, or at least since I was a kid. Always, you go feed the ducks. I was so excited to show the babies the ducks! But, for the first time ever, there were no ducks! What happened to the ducks???
@farmreporter Still here. It's been a very unusual week and posting has not quite fit into the schedule. But it's Saturday morning, and I'm hoping to get a few pics up!
@frankhymus Mentor critique? I did some work on the eyes per your comments from an earlier shot.
As is the norm for me, the eyes were not tack sharp to begin with, but I used a layer in PS to increase the highlights and another layer to run a high pass sharpening action.
For the entire photo, I used an Unsharp Mask for overall sharpness, tried to reduce the noise a little, and also applied a Gaussian blur to the entire photo and masked her out.
The final thing I TRIED to do was a separate layer to decrease the background exposure, then another layer to increase the exposure on her face just a tiny bit. I feathered both of those selections fairly significantly so that, in PS anyway, you absolutely could not tell I had done any of that. However, once exported, the feathering did not work. Here's the photo with the error: http://365project.org/shesnapped/others/2016-06-08
I tried saving without each of the exposure layers, one without the background layer, one without the baby layer, but they both had that non-feathered halo. They look perfect in PS, but something is happening that I can't figure out.
@shesnapped Know what you mean! I run the opposite schedule and it's my weekends that are too hectic for 365. But I have been good - up to 18 days in a row of pics posted!
@shesnapped Overall, you pulled off the workflow very well. It's very much what I do with most portraits I shoot. Don't concern yourself that the eyes didn't happen in the camera. Do your best with the focus and then leap in with selective sharpening/ I usually apply shadow recovery to the eyes, but I see how working the highlights almost certainly worked better in this shot.
The background blur effect is right along my ideas too. Don't tell too many folks about that, just sit back and let them talk about wonderful selective focus or beautiful bokeh!
Yes, the work to look into is to decrease the light in (parts of) the background. Not too much as I think you want to keep the back lit theme. You might read some of the references Kathy B mentions in the Technique 57 challenge on back lighting if you need more ideas particularly about the shooting phase.
As for processing what you have, it would be best to select the parts you want into a mask or layer first and then operate on that, the selection is quite difficult especially around the face. You can also select what you don't want and invert the selection if that works out easier.
Several ways to make the awkward selection. Perhaps the simplest is to duplicate the background, do a color selection - Selection | Color Range... - and with "selected colors" (the default) in the top control, use the eyedropper tools to the right to select the colors you want in the mask. You can add other colors by holding down the Shift key and clicking again. OK will get you just a layer mask which you can operate on/paint on further if the selections bled over to where you didn't want them. Load with actually delete out from the layer what is black. I usually do the first, allowing other mask operations first before I operate. You can also try the "out of gamut" selection in the top control and see what that does for you. I think that will certainly select the ultra blown highlights, might also get part of the highlights on the face, so again best to accept into a mask if you want to operate some more.
Order of the operations matters too. I trust you do noise rediction very early, about the first thing in Camera Raw. And output sharpening (selective too because you have a blurred background) should come last. The high pass action on the eyes should come just before this final sharpening, at least operating in RGB mode. We can talk about color management in Lab mode at another time..
You could have made the overall task somewhat simpler - you could be shooting at a much lower ISO - with a little fill low power flash to start with, but you would want to use an off-board flash and not have it aimed right down the barrel of the lens and destroy the lovely natural lighting. I would have had the girl draw her arm back some, not remove it, but it stops you cropping on the left too much which I would like to do, and it being so far forward effects the perspective unnaturally, at least for me.
By the way, the composition is rather nice and the light coming onto the face from the left is most effective. I'd cut it closer on three sides, especially the left and the right. My taste, I don't like a lot of "negative space" around a portrait. If that's what you call it. As I said though, what you can do with this one is not as much as I personally would have liked.
Good luck, and I hope all these words work for you. "Selection Tools" would be the next thing for you to pay attention to in Photoshop. There are so many powerful ones, some easier than others.
@frankhymus Thank you for that commentary! I'm going to change the order of operations and see if that fixes the halo AND see how it affects the photo. My order is different than your suggestion.
Also, as I look at this shot again, is she too green?
@shesnapped Probably. The simplest way to remove that cast is to adjust the magenta/green mixture in the white balance. You could also try the green channel of levels. Both of course locally on a layer.
As for order, mine is the recommendation of almost every "expert" I know about.
@frankhymus Frank, I've actually re-edited this one from the beginning because the noise reduction didn't take due to saving back to LR then going back to PS the following day. In this edit, I've waited until the very end to do the Sharpening, but I can't figure out how to make the sharpening apply to all the below layers. If I create a new layer, it's blank, therefore nothing to sharpen. If I create a layer from the previous layer (in this case a Brightness/Contrast layer) then it only sharpens the area not masked out, and of course if I duplicate the one of the very first layers, then it doesn't take into account all the layers in between and I "lose" all that work. I'm stumped!
@shesnapped If you flatten the image first, you can then sharpen the whole image. If you want to save the layer stack, then save it as a psd BEFORE the final sharpening. It's yet another reason you sharpen as the final step, on the flattened image. Of course after flattening, then duplicate again and sharpen on that new second layer and then adjust blending, opacity and such...
It is really not a good idea to do output sharpening before color and tone adjustment, since you are yet to add color and especially tone adjustments, and that will affect the sharpening that you have already done, throwing it off possibly.
@frankhymus As to the sharpening before the tones and such, that' which you pointed out is exactly what I ran into when I tried to move the layers around. It was another reason I started all over from scratch.
As is the norm for me, the eyes were not tack sharp to begin with, but I used a layer in PS to increase the highlights and another layer to run a high pass sharpening action.
For the entire photo, I used an Unsharp Mask for overall sharpness, tried to reduce the noise a little, and also applied a Gaussian blur to the entire photo and masked her out.
The final thing I TRIED to do was a separate layer to decrease the background exposure, then another layer to increase the exposure on her face just a tiny bit. I feathered both of those selections fairly significantly so that, in PS anyway, you absolutely could not tell I had done any of that. However, once exported, the feathering did not work. Here's the photo with the error: http://365project.org/shesnapped/others/2016-06-08
I tried saving without each of the exposure layers, one without the background layer, one without the baby layer, but they both had that non-feathered halo. They look perfect in PS, but something is happening that I can't figure out.
The background blur effect is right along my ideas too. Don't tell too many folks about that, just sit back and let them talk about wonderful selective focus or beautiful bokeh!
Yes, the work to look into is to decrease the light in (parts of) the background. Not too much as I think you want to keep the back lit theme. You might read some of the references Kathy B mentions in the Technique 57 challenge on back lighting if you need more ideas particularly about the shooting phase.
As for processing what you have, it would be best to select the parts you want into a mask or layer first and then operate on that, the selection is quite difficult especially around the face. You can also select what you don't want and invert the selection if that works out easier.
Several ways to make the awkward selection. Perhaps the simplest is to duplicate the background, do a color selection - Selection | Color Range... - and with "selected colors" (the default) in the top control, use the eyedropper tools to the right to select the colors you want in the mask. You can add other colors by holding down the Shift key and clicking again. OK will get you just a layer mask which you can operate on/paint on further if the selections bled over to where you didn't want them. Load with actually delete out from the layer what is black. I usually do the first, allowing other mask operations first before I operate. You can also try the "out of gamut" selection in the top control and see what that does for you. I think that will certainly select the ultra blown highlights, might also get part of the highlights on the face, so again best to accept into a mask if you want to operate some more.
Order of the operations matters too. I trust you do noise rediction very early, about the first thing in Camera Raw. And output sharpening (selective too because you have a blurred background) should come last. The high pass action on the eyes should come just before this final sharpening, at least operating in RGB mode. We can talk about color management in Lab mode at another time..
You could have made the overall task somewhat simpler - you could be shooting at a much lower ISO - with a little fill low power flash to start with, but you would want to use an off-board flash and not have it aimed right down the barrel of the lens and destroy the lovely natural lighting. I would have had the girl draw her arm back some, not remove it, but it stops you cropping on the left too much which I would like to do, and it being so far forward effects the perspective unnaturally, at least for me.
By the way, the composition is rather nice and the light coming onto the face from the left is most effective. I'd cut it closer on three sides, especially the left and the right. My taste, I don't like a lot of "negative space" around a portrait. If that's what you call it. As I said though, what you can do with this one is not as much as I personally would have liked.
Good luck, and I hope all these words work for you. "Selection Tools" would be the next thing for you to pay attention to in Photoshop. There are so many powerful ones, some easier than others.
Also, as I look at this shot again, is she too green?
As for order, mine is the recommendation of almost every "expert" I know about.