NON Square Cropped Portraits - (nSCP's) - Archive

[Colin Southern]

Hi Colin; it is very good but would benefit from even greater resolution. Subtitles or audio also add to the bandwidth and I don't know if it would be viable considering charges for bandwidth. I think I've seen some HD in youtube, possibly to do with sensor cleaning. cheers Brilliant work.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for that.

The resolution is the same as what I'm already using - which is pretty high - so I'm guessing you mean the bit depth?

I can see the need for this kind of thing more often, so I'm going to have to put a bit more thought into it ...

.

[Alis]

I can see the need for this kind of thing more often, so I'm going to have to put a bit more thought into it ...

.

Or, we will have to go to NZ to pay you a personal visit for a short course of photography

[wilgk]

I hired a very good lens for the Equestrian comp last week - so rather than waste a day with it - I cajoled my daughter & her friend into letting me practice on them to try and learn something in this area. I usually find with my people pictures outside when the exposure is right for skin tones, the sky tends to end up being very washed out - so I tried to get some greenery in the background to help with that.
I wanted to have the sun on their hair backlighting them and then used flash to catch their eyes - maybe too much backlight I'm thinking as your eye gets drawn to that bright area?.
Advice on improvements to try for next time gratefully received - thankyou.

[wilgk]

I will give a couple of examples if that's ok - 1 may be very close to being square so I hope you will forgive me as i didn't want to clutter up both categories on the same post!

[wilgk]

[arith]

All of them are good and I like the portrait the most

[Colin Southern]

[Colin Southern]

Hi Kay,

Good stuff

If you want to "tke it to the next level" though you're going to either have to get your flash off the camera, or point it to the left or right and bounce the light of something white to give the light a bit of direction; the way it is at the moment it's very flat and quite a lot of specularity (where the light bounces of skin oils etc right back into the camera). It probably depends on how far you want to go .. setting up the likes of reflectors etc (even if it's just a big white sheet) starts to take a LOT more time & effort

[Ashwin]

Hi Ali,

It's no secret -- I'm just not sure what the best way to get it to everyone who's interested is (the zipped file is 60MB - the unzipped file is 90+ MB) - also, it's a full screen capture (1920 x 1080) - so I'm not sure how it would look unless played at at least that size - plus, I don't have the ability to add audio. I sent it to Steve via sendthisfile that can only be downloaded 3 times - so how about we let Steve download it first - give us some feedback - and then I'll send the link to a couple of others if anyone's still interested? (I'd rather not upload it too many times at the moment as my daughter has been watching lots of online videos during these school holidays and has used must of my bandwidth for the month (with 2 weeks still to go) ... and I get put back to dialup speed if we use much more)

Hi Colin,

If you can send video and separately recorded audio file I can send you back combined AVI file ( VIDEO with AUDIO )which can be played in Microsoft Media player. and Quicktime player

Also please note that I can also change the resolution of the file to suit your requirement.

Or if you all like I can upload ( VIDEO - Audio ) file to YOUTUBE so that whoever wants to view can view it.

[Ashwin]

I think backlight is very strong

[wilgk]

Hi Kay,

Good stuff

If you want to "tke it to the next level" though you're going to either have to get your flash off the camera, or point it to the left or right and bounce the light of something white to give the light a bit of direction; the way it is at the moment it's very flat and quite a lot of specularity (where the light bounces of skin oils etc right back into the camera). It probably depends on how far you want to go .. setting up the likes of reflectors etc (even if it's just a big white sheet) starts to take a LOT more time & effort

Thanks Colin - the 'next level' will definitely be in years to come! - I'll go back to Basketball for now
Although I think I at least understand what you mean when I look at my attempt next to the 'real thing' in your example - so maybe there's hope for me.
Thanks again....and you don't look at all like Shrek, wrong skin tones entirely..although maybe the 'BFG'...I'll go check the book

[Colin Southern]

Hi Colin,

If you can send video and separately recorded audio file I can send you back combined AVI file ( VIDEO with AUDIO )which can be played in Microsoft Media player. and Quicktime player

Also please note that I can also change the resolution of the file to suit your requirement.

Or if you all like I can upload ( VIDEO - Audio ) file to YOUTUBE so that whoever wants to view can view it.

Thanks Ashwin,

If I get a microphone then I can do all of that too -- the issue I'm more concerned about though is getting sufficient resolution at a sufficient bit depth for any such videos to still be useful ... it really needs to be HD quality, and I'm guessing that a 10 minute video would be into the hundreds of MB.

Thanks for the offer though.

[Ashwin]

Thanks Ashwin,

If I get a microphone then I can do all of that too -- the issue I'm more concerned about though is getting sufficient resolution at a sufficient bit depth for any such videos to still be useful ... it really needs to be HD quality, and I'm guessing that a 10 minute video would be into the hundreds of MB.

Thanks for the offer though.

Hi Colin,

I have got equipment, and I can encode your HD Footage to H.264 formate,
(At higher resolution With this converaion we are preparing BLU-RAY disk for viewing on HDTV. My one hour of HDVideo file is about 25 GB)

My experiance shows that there is no loss of quality even I downsize it for viewing in YouTube, or for WEB.

[Sahil]

Hi Sahil,

The grayscale conversion part was easy - no fancy channel mixers or anything like that ... I just throw on a HSB layer - tick "colourise" - set the hue to 38 and then the saturation to around 8% (you guessed it - it's not a true grayscale, but my little "add a touch of sepia" fools approx 100% of people .

In terms of the rest of the conversion, I can't really remember all the steps, and they probably don't necessarily apply to working on an original anyway. I knocked the exposure back about a stop and put a 0.5 pixel gaussean blur across the image though (I remember that bit!).

Thanks a tonne, Colin. Now I know another way to convert the pics into B&W. Trying my hand on another, similar pic.

[Sahil]

Here is another try. Any better?

[arith]

Lubbly Jubbly, Smashing. She sure is a good subject and seems to know how to look the way she wants.

[Petracsr]

Great image, Sahil!

[Sahil]

Thanks, Petra & steve!

[Ashwin]

The resolution is the same as what I'm already using - which is pretty high - so I'm guessing you mean the bit depth?

I can see the need for this kind of thing more often, so I'm going to have to put a bit more thought into it ...

.

Though you might be aware and knowing. Still I want to tell you that WITH " ADOBE CONNECTNOW " this is a freeware if shared between 3viewer.

Whatever you are doing on your screen ( and if you have mic. your voice also ) can be viewed by 2 more persons in realtime.

Thatway you don't have to uload or sent any big file over internet.

[peterb533]