diffuse glow for wedding photography

[wxnut]

What looks best, Black and White or color, and do these look OK? I have JUST discoverd the diffuse glow tool and can see it working wonders with wedding photography. Is it too much? Can anyone give me some tips to working with this tool? Maybe some good turorials you know of online?

Doug Raflik
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http://www.wxnut.net

 

[Karalee]

Diffused glow is great.... In moderation

Seems a bit overused here, youve lost a lot of details in both the dresses and flowers.

 

[Big Mike]

I like the color one better...there just seems to be too much white in the b&w version.
The shot itself looks a little over exposed...most of the dresses are blown out.

Diffuse glow can have a nice look...but can be over-used, just like any thing. Hey, if it makes the client happy then it's all good.

 

[Vmann]

I prefer the color to the BW... the BW looks to blown out. I use diffuse glow occasionally and one of my favorite things to do is make a selection useing the select by color or one of the other ways you prefer to make a selection. Copy the selection to a new layer then run the filter. Know you can adjust the opacity, more blur, etc. after the filter to give furter control of the effect and a more precise glow to pieces of the image.

 

[skiboarder72]

why is my diffused glow making strange dark marks...

is there an easy way to ad this glow effect he did... sorry for the stupidness of the question

 

[Alpha]

color shot is much better, and they're both wayyy too soft.

 

[Rob]

My first thought was Yikes! Erm, to put it bluntly, you've overdone it here with the PS. The lighting on the lady's face has ended up too harsh and it looks like you've put the catchlight in manually in PS. The diffuse glow/softening effect has lost any sense of reality the picture may have had and has completely stuffed the B&W image.

Ideally you needed a large 3' gold reflector to counter that cold hard light coming from the window. You've posed them both well, and the facial expressions are fine, but background background background... You've got black, white, a plant! The dresses billowing to fill the foreground is a good idea, a standard wedding shot, and was probably the best thing to do in this situation.

Actually you weren't far off with this shot, but you were far off enough to make the extra filtering and touching up blow some areas out and soften others unacceptably. I would recommend a lot more subtlety around the midtone ranges, selectively dodging and burning to restore balance to the image.

If I haven't completely offended you, then I can have a crack at a sample image in PS to show you what I mean... only if you're interested though - I've been harsh, but this is critique, not general. (and that's why I don't post here much!)

Rob

 

['Daniel']

It looks like you just blurred the original image.

I find to do diffuse glow you should duplicate the layer, set to overlay, gaussian blur then mess with levels and reduce opacity.

Maybe you did this, that's how I do it anyway.

As has been said it has been overdone here I think.