Less pp.... C&C needed.

[cailinp]

Took a quick candid of my munchkin to practice some pp on. I wanted to do very little pp as I was starting to feel like I had been doing too much in previous photos. I know the focus is pretty awful but other than that....and her awkward expression, how did this photo turn out?

 

[bazooka]

It's not working for me. Her face is underexposed and it seems odd that the inside of her mouth is completely black... that doesn't seem natural to me. The hand holding the paper in front of fatigues pretty much removes any feeling of a quality photograph for me. The composition puts a little too much emphasis on her sweater and not enough on her face. I do like the soft natural light coming from the side though.

 

[Sbuxo]

I actually don't mind her expression, and the man in uniform isn't so much a distraction as he is a part of the story the photo might tell to anyone's interpretation.
Her face is pretty dark on my screen, but I just upped the brightness on my monitor and it looks much better, so I think you should wait for someone with a calibrated monitor to comment on that to be 100% sure. Her eyes are beautiful and her face is soo cute, I really like this image. I think it would be a good call if you added some subtle highlights to her hair and a few hairs of highlight in her eyes.
I think it fits well into the category of a Decisive Moment.:love:

 

[tsaraleksi]

I think the PP you need to do on this is recentering the brightness so that it focuses on her face-- right now she's the darkest point of the image, which makes it a bit confusing from a tonality perspective.

 

[cailinp]

One more thats focused better.

 

[tsaraleksi]

Brightness edit

B&W

Played around with some editing on them, probably a little heavy handed but I wanted to illustrate what I was talking about in terms of 'recentering' the brightness.

 

[D-B-J]

tsaraleksi, how did you do that exactly?

 

[tsaraleksi]

It's just layers editing, I made a brief tutorial that you can see here (it covers more than just layers but they're in there)

 

[EmmaIam]

Converting to monochrome would help this image out. Whack up the curves and convert it, it's a sweet portrait, even sweeter to you as she is your 'munchkin' ! Took about ten minutes to convert this, concentrating more on playing with the colours before converting, did a slight burn around the edges v used history brush to remove any blow outs due to the processing. You now have a black and white munchkin...!