I am really enjoying this

[mugge]

The woman in this image was just going to be part of the scene when I decided that her obvious joy and gentle smile was worth taken. C&C most welcome.

I am really enjoying this by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

[mugge]

A bit on the soft side. Amended image.

I am enjoying this 2 by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

[MrB]

The second gives more emphasis to the clothing. I like the first after a slight downward pull on the contrast curve. Consider removing the hands at top left?

Philip

[DanK]

I think this is a superb capture, but it will take some editing, mostly local adjustments, to make it stand out as a photo, IMHO.

Three issues:

1. The most minor: if there is material there, I would crop less at the bottom (don't chop the hand) and on the left (leave a little more room).

2. The image is relatively low contrast; you have a full tonal range, but not contrast in the places that most matter.

3. the biggest one: the face, which is a wonderful capture, doesn't stand out from the background, which is busy and tonally similar.

There would be a variety of ways to fix #3. I'll show you what I did. I did it quickly, so it is just an illustration. These are all local adjustments, and I did them all the same way: by attaching a black mask and painting with a very soft white brush, set to 10% flow.

1. Increase contrast on the woman.
2. Decrease contrast on everything else
3. Burn the woman a bit to darken her relative to the background.
4. Create a composite layer of all of that (shift ctrl alt E) and open a camera raw filter on that new layer. Move texture as low as it can go, and drop clarity about halfway. Attach a black mask, and then copy the mask from #2 to avoid having to paint again.

Here is the adjustment panel. The reduce-contrast layer 2 is what is showing.



Here's the result. It's a quick and dirty edit (it took just a few minutes), but I think it makes the woman's face stand out and grab attention.

[Manfred M]

Very strong capture Ole.

I find much to the image too "hot" and might go in a slightly different direction than Dan has.

[mugge]

Thank you Dan and Manfred. I like both versions. On seeing Manfred's version I am leaning (ever so slightly) towards that.
Cheers Ole

[DanK]

I don't actually have a strong preference for my own. Both share one characteristic: both create a tonal difference between the background and the person. That's a step toward a broader goal: making the person stand out from the background.

If I were going Manfred's route, I would burn the hands. They look artificially lit when the rest is so dark.

[Shadowman]

Nice effort.

[Manfred M]

If I were going Manfred's route, I would burn the hands. They look artificially lit when the rest is so dark.

I would too Dan - I noticed that right after I had uploaded the image.

[Jim A]

Very good image to work on, Ole - well seen and captured. I was going to mention the absence of the blacks, but Manfred has already covered that. We are lucky to get such good feedback

[MrB]

A keyword for me in Post #1 is "gentle" but the edits seem to give a hardness/harshness to the image. This is an attempt to give emphasis to the lady - no sharpening, a small reduction of highlight brightness, a curves adjustment to enhance contrast, darkening and blurring the background to reduce the distractions (particularly the hands at top left) - while trying to retain a more gentle feel. My editing is unlikely to be as skilful as some here but I hope I have conveyed my main point.



Philip

[DanK]

The more the merrier. It seems to me that this thread illustrates some important general points.

First, a given capture can produce a variety of different images. That's why learning postprocessing skills is such an important part of photography.

Second, as different as these three edits are, they all tried to do two things: make the background less distracting, and make the subject stand out more from the background. There are many paths to that end.

Philip, I didn't do any sharpening at all in my edit. I'm guessing that what you perceive as sharpening is just contrast. Both my edit and Manfred's have considerably more contrast on the woman, but not on the background. I think my edit may be more extreme than his.

Just speaking for myself, I didn't apply any global edits at all. Everything I did was a local edit. You can see that from the partially black masks on each of the layers. The first layer above the background is where I increased contrast on the woman. It is whitest over her face, meaning that I painted on more of the contrast adjustment there. (Flow was set to 10%, so each brush stroke had only a modest impact). I could have done that less. In fact, if I still had the image in photoshop, I could change the foreground color to black and paint over the face a bit to reduce the contrast.

[Manfred M]

The one thing I enjoy is looking at how different people approach the same subject. In the case of the edits we see here, the one thing that it drives home is how each of us looks at the same image a little differently and how our own personal styles. We can't affect the posted image in the way that it was captured, so we are limited to making adjustments with what is there.

I made two global adjustments; decreased the lightness and increased the mid-tone contrast. Everything else I did was to dodge and burn to emphasize areas of the image that I found to be important and to de-emphasize areas that were not; in some cases this was to downplay distracting elements and in others it was to bring out areas that I felt that needed to stand out.

What struck me with this image were the textures in the subjects face and hands and wanted to emphasize those areas of the image. Areas that were distracting, needed to be calmed down. I might clone down or heal some places, but would generally not apply a blur like Philip did, because I find that this results in leaving too much evidence of retouching work in the background. If I wanted to spend the time, I might have taken the same approach Dan did to downplay some of the background elements by reducing contrast locally, before burning them down.

Mostly I try not to spend more than 5 minutes on an edit here. In practice, I will spend hours on any image that I plan to print, but given the relatively low resolution of files we show on the internet, I try to limit my retouching to 10 or 15 minutes, unless I post print-ready images of my own.