Need Advice . . . How do I make this photo better??

[Kathy O]

I like the composition of this photo, but how can I improve the quality of the photo using Lightroom 4? Thanks for your help

[Stagecoach]

Kathy,

Great shot and must be viewed in the lightbox full size to appreciate.

What 'quality' are you referring to?

[Kathy O]

Kathy,

Great shot and must be viewed in the lightbox full size to appreciate.

What 'quality' are you referring to?

Grahame,
Thanks for taking the time to look. I guess I just feel that it is lacking something and was wondering if there was something I could do to improve the photo or am I just being to picky (maybe it is good the way it is?) Just need some insight from other people. Thanks for complimenting the photo.

[Radu Dinu Cordeanu]

Hi,
Something like that,probably,play with shadow and black towards "plus".
Success!

[Colin Southern]

"Serving Suggestion" ...

[ajohnw]

Same sort of thing except done with contrast and brightness. The same could be achieved with curves. Being lazy I used a filter that stretches black to white to fill the entire gamut. I might also locally tone down the little ladies leggings as there is no detail or anything in them and they are a little distracting - problem in that area is that once some one looks at a photo critically it is distracting however I think that was my initial reaction.

There are several ways to help with deep blacks. One is the camera tone curve. If you look at this you will see that your cameras natural curve goes further into the black than the others. The detail will be there but compressed so can be bought out.

http://1.static.img-dpreview.com/rev...yle.png?v=2543

The other way is to deliberately over expose and get the blacks right. In this case there are no bright highlights so there is some scope. Often when there are highlights, clouds and sky, it's best to work the other way round and ensure that the highlights are captured correctly when working with jpg's. In either case other tones will need adjustment. The aim is to get the difficult end correct so that it doesn't need any adjustment.

Then there is working with raw although in this case I suspect the leggings would still be a problem if a default camera exposure is used.

All in all it's probably best to tone the leggings down / if you intend to take photo's think about the colours / tonal range of the clothes a person is wearing. Blacks can and are a problem, whites can be a nightmare - just look at the lack of detail in many wedding dress photo's taken by "professionals". Bracketing exposures can help as can merging 2 different exposures.



All in all it's a pretty good shot - mine - should have bought the dogs face out a little more really but I suspect + 1 stop and adjustment would give a better result. We have a black dog.

John
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[Kathy O]

"Serving Suggestion" ...

Love this Colin!! Can you tell me what you did???

[AB26]

Kathy O Kathy,

With an image like this you are only glad if it was shot with a camera that allows you to have it enlarged to A1.
Not even the tad of "over exposure" on the right arm takes away anything from this stunning moment in time.

[ajohnw]

Kathy O Kathy,

With an image like this you are only glad if it was shot with a camera that allows you to have it enlarged to A1.
Not even the tad of "over exposure" on the right arm takes away anything from this stunning moment in time.

Whoops, missed that.

John
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[ajohnw]

I will take the whoops back. There is some left in the highlights on the arm and maybe signs of to much compression. Colin looks to have recovered some of it too.

The blacks may be clipped by something as there are areas of 0.0.0 rgb. Unusual so I would guess this may have been done from raw.

John
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[rpcrowe]

Kathy, this is a wonderful picture showing the interface between a dog and a child. IMO, there is nothing more heartwarming.

Since I have had both knees replaced and spinal fusion several years ago, I have become quite sensitive to being unable to squat when shooting. Actually, I CAN SQUAT, I just cannot get up after squatting. I mention this because in shooting the original image, getting a bit lower and a bit over to your right might have allowed us to see the smile which I think was beaming on the child's face...

[Colin Southern]

Love this Colin!! Can you tell me what you did???

Hi Kathy,

I did a few things - some may not be immediately obvious, so I'll go through them:

1. The crop. I'm a believer that parts of an image need to justify themselves or they're history. This image is about the interaction between the boy and the dog - nothing else - so the original right-hand side portion didn't contribute anything; it was just a distraction.

2. The crop. The "kiss" takes centre stage - so you really want it in the centre, esp with regards to (3) below.

3. The Vignette. We want to draw the eye to where the action is - and nothing's easier when that's in the middle

4. The Sepia treatment. The green is horribly distracting. HORRIBLY. To turn it into sepia I just desaturated it and then added a HSB layer with colorise selected and my standard value of 38 selected for the hue and around 10% for the saturation (vary to suit). LR is sure to have equivalents.

5. The frame -- line colours chosen from the image.

6. General - bit of burning to lower the highlights on the arm that the vignette missed, and of course a couple of sharpening passes.

This is an image that should be printed on stretched canvas and hung as a 22 x 22" - happy to retouch the original for you to do that if it helps.

[ajohnw]

I've been looking at your shot Colin. Had no problem with the vignetting but awful problems getting the tone. I've tried this before using gimp.

Have the original image at the bottom, black layer in saturate mode above that and then a tint layer. I'd guessed at a hue value of around 35. Just adjusted that to 38 and varied the opacity but the tone you have just wont come up. The black layer has the same effect as HSV and desaturation.. Any ideas about the tone? Most of the tutorials mention messing about with the colour of the original but even that doesn't seem to make much difference without introducing maxed out areas.

John
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[Colin Southern]

I've been looking at your shot Colin. Had no problem with the vignetting but awful problems getting the tone. I've tried this before using gimp.

Have the original image at the bottom, black layer in saturate mode above that and then a tint layer. I'd guessed at a hue value of around 35. Just adjusted that to 38 and varied the opacity but the tone you have just wont come up. The black layer has the same effect as HSV and desaturation.. Any ideas about the tone? Most of the tutorials mention messing about with the colour of the original but even that doesn't seem to make much difference without introducing maxed out areas.

John
-

Hi John,

Sorry - I probably can't be much help. In a Photoshop it's always the same numbers, but have no info on whether other programs are the same.

Some also have sepia filters.

[Kathy O]

Hi Kathy,

I did a few things - some may not be immediately obvious, so I'll go through them:

1. The crop. I'm a believer that parts of an image need to justify themselves or they're history. This image is about the interaction between the boy and the dog - nothing else - so the original right-hand side portion didn't contribute anything; it was just a distraction.

2. The crop. The "kiss" takes centre stage - so you really want it in the centre, esp with regards to (3) below.

3. The Vignette. We want to draw the eye to where the action is - and nothing's easier when that's in the middle

4. The Sepia treatment. The green is horribly distracting. HORRIBLY. To turn it into sepia I just desaturated it and then added a HSB layer with colorise selected and my standard value of 38 selected for the hue and around 10% for the saturation (vary to suit). LR is sure to have equivalents.

5. The frame -- line colours chosen from the image.

6. General - bit of burning to lower the highlights on the arm that the vignette missed, and of course a couple of sharpening passes.

This is an image that should be printed on stretched canvas and hung as a 22 x 22" - happy to retouch the original for you to do that if it helps.

Thanks for the helpful information Colin, I did not know how to minimize the highlights on the sleeve but thanks to you I now have an idea how to do it.

[AB26]

This image is about the interaction between the boy and the dog

Shame on you Colin. Do little All Blacks wear pink?

[Colin Southern]

Shame on you Colin. Do little All Blacks wear pink?

I'm guessing that that's your way of saying that the little "boy" is actually a little girl. If so then I apologise -- I thought I read boy somewhere looking through the other replies.

As for the All Blacks, does this answer your question?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJORLad1IZk

[AB26]

As for the All Blacks, does this answer your question?

To many Boks wearing pink, that is the reason the All Blacks had to hit them with handbags.

[Kathy O]

"Serving Suggestion" ...

Colin,
here is my version, I tried really hard to get it as close as I could to yours but yours seems to be so much sharper than mine, I tried to sharpen more but it made my photo look strange. Thanks for helping me to see the photo in a different way.

Kathy

[Colin Southern]

Colin,
here is my version, I tried really hard to get it as close as I could to yours but yours seems to be so much sharper than mine, I tried to sharpen more but it made my photo look strange. Thanks for helping me to see the photo in a different way.

Kathy

Hi Kathy,

After you apply a heavy vignette it pays to re-evaluate the overall levels -- I was able to push them another 2/3 of a stop. In terms of sharpening, I applied 1px @ 150% to your image to sharpen the hair in particular, but used the history brush to roll of back over some of the image (in particular the clothing).

Other than that, I think you did really well!