Couple in period costume

[Jim A]

Two photos that I put together this afternoon. One from Napier, North Island, New Zealand - the staircase. The other from my wife and I recent trip to Greytown, North Island, New Zealand - the couple in period costume.

[royent]

I like the concept but I find the shadows of the couple and the shadow of the gent on the lady, a little bit too heavy Sorry

[pschlute]

It is a nice record, but the lighting was not your friend here. Hard shadows and over-bright faces on your right.

[Manfred M]

Similar issue to the image of the city in the bowl; the lighting is not consistent as seen with the shadows. I wonder about the scaling as well.

1, The background has a soft and diffuse light with little or no shadow, yet the two characters are in a very hard light that comes from the camera left. The shadows on the floor are consistent with back lighting, but the shadows on the characters (as well as the light patterns on them) suggest a light source that is front the side and a bit from the front.

2. Scale - anything closer to the camera appears larger, yet the two characters appear to be fairly small when we look at the house and staircase behind them.


Creating a "fake" is generally much harder than doing a real posed shot, because we have to see all those issues.

[rpcrowe]

It looks to me that there was a hard light source at camera right which resulted in brightness at image right and harsh shadows at image left...

IMO, one of the best ways to have prevented this problem would have been to shift the couple around counterclockwise so that both the man and the woman would have been approximately the same distance from the hard light source. The exposure then would have been approximately equal and the man's shadow would not have fallen so hard on the woman...

Of course, we often have to make do with the poses we have in situations like this.

Another way to improve the lighting might have been to have a diffused flash at camera left to fill in the shadows. I almost always travel with a pair of small Godox flashes equipped with Demb flash diffusers. One on the camera as the master and (holding the camera with one hand) extending the slave flash out in my left hand.

However, I have attempted to work opening the shadows in NIK Viveza II with this result...

[Jim A]

Great comments, thanks folks! I have come up with this using Nik Silver Efex Plugin – Antique Plate II. Also, I increased the size of the image of the couple which had been “placed” from a PNG file. What do you think?

[Manfred M]

The filter that you used hides a lot of issues, but also kills the important detail in the subjects faces. The scale looks much more reasonable in this image as the subjects are large enough to dominate the image. I'm still not loving what the shadows on the floor are doing.

There is something very strange happening with the man's camera left pant leg.

[royent]

The man's shadow on the lady is still too strong

[Chataignier]

Composites are sooooo difficult - the eye picks up slightest inconsistency in lighting - not perfect but better than I could have done.