Wedding, waterfall with backlight, at night, flash.

[RyanLilly]

Ok I'm Mainly looking for some advice on what I should do in photoshop, with this image. So basically I was a guest at my friends wedding and just shooting a few photos for the hell of it. They had a hired photographer, so I was just there to have fun. I was just able to snap this shot after the hired tog had to go shoot something else, so just before the bride and groom got up to go back inside, I asked them to hold the pose just a second, I would have gotten it better, but I didn't want to hold anything up or get in the way.
I was shooting my 20D an 50mm 1.4 on manual, and manual flash.
I wish I had a tripod and more time because a longer shutter speed would have been nice to capture the landscape lighting better.




Now the composition is not great, but its what I have to work with. this is the original, but I have started on it in photoshop, I started by selecting the background with out the bride and groom, so I could adjust the ambient light, and the bride and groom separately, cloned out the flower pot in the front, and adjusted noise and sharpening a bit. so far so good but...

What would you guys/gals do. Remove the hard shadow on the right? and what would be the best way to do that, just select it and patch tool in the rock thats right next to it, Clone Stamp?

I know my profile is set to "not Ok" but feel free to play with this one if you like, or just offer up some wisdom.

Thanks very much,
Ryan

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[RyanLilly]

I changed a few things. Cloned out the hard shadow and the flowerpot, maybe a little sloppy, a bit of curves and contrast mainly on the water fall to make it pop a bit, Could use a bit more maybe.
I'm just unsure of the right way to do these thing, so if anyone has any advice it would be a big help. This was pretty much just a practice run. I'll probably start from square one before I think about printing.

[prodigy2k7]

here is my shot at it...

[prodigy2k7]

lol luna did what i was too lazy to do

[Rhubarb]

* Curves adjustment layer - increased overall brightness with the aim to the bring the background out. Then masked out the B&G.
* Masked the foreground at 18% opactity as it was too bright for the background.
* Cloned out hard shadow in a new layer, reduced opacity to 90% to leave a faint 'soft' shadow.
* Curves adjustment layer - really boosted the overall birghtness to get the top right corner to lighten up. Masked the rest of picture expect the top right hand corner.
* Hue/Saturation adustment layer - selected a 'yellow' colour range, and shifted it towards green and slightly bumped the saturation. This was to get the yellow looking plants to look green!
*Curves adjustment layer - Bumped down the blue channel to remove the blue color cast.
*Cropped the bottom of pic (I know you may need it this size to print, but it really doesn't add anything to the pic).
*Unsharp mask.

Hope that helps.

[Kegger]

Wonderful edit, but you missed the red eye.

[Rhubarb]

Wonderful edit, but you missed the red eye.

Thanks! I did go to fix the red eye but there were so few pixels in that size image for the eyes I skipped over it. I would also clone out the yellow light to the top left, as its quite distracting.