A girl and her dog! C&C please

[ChelsJanePhotography]

So taking photos with a rambunctious dog was quite a challenge! She did calm down long enough for me to get this shot! C&C welcome

 

[ChelsJanePhotography]

any advice on how to get the redness out of her skin in PSE would be greatly appreciated

 

[Gavjenks]

Two really major problems here:

1) You did a really poor job of apparently attempting to manually blur the grass all around the dog's legs?? Why? What was wrong with the grass? This sort of thing never works out right. And blurring stuff that's in between other not-blurred things would look really weird anyway, even if you were masterful enough at photoshop to make it look real.

As a good rule of thumb: pretty much any time you find yourself using a polygon lasso and painstakingly following the curve of something in photoshop, that's a good sign you should strongly re-evaluate your editing decisions, or trash the photo if whatever problem you're trying to fix is that severe.

Should just leave that alone completely.

If you ABSOLUTELY MUST select areas for spot-editing, always try to use "refine selection" and then "feather" the selection a decent amount to make the edges of it not sharp and obvious. For instance, when dodging or burning (you should dodge and burn by selecting rounding areas, feathering them, then using the curves tool). But even that wouldn't at all work in this case, because the grass blades and the dog have dozens of tiny sharp contrast boundaries that would be murderously difficult to separate (and again, wouldn't make any sense even if you did)

2) Your red channel has severely blown out highlights, which makes the face look posterized and blotchy and oddly colored. I'm not sure what would have done this, considering most of the rest of the image looks like it's colored pretty well. Did you manually edit the colors on just the face? If so, you made it way too red. If not, then it's probably some sort of problem with your camera's white balance.

You can check this sort of thing in the field by setting your camera to show an RGB histogram in preview mode, and then making sure that your shots aren't piling up pixels on the right side in any of the color channels or in lightness.



Other than those two things, I like the photo. Good composition and pose, good genuine feel to it.

 

[frommrstomommy]

^^ yes. im just one handed at the moment n couldnt type all that.

 

[ChelsJanePhotography]

Comments on this edit? I feel like its a little lifeless....

 

[Tiller]

<img src="http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=46861"/>
Comments on this edit? I feel like its a little lifeless....

Well it's 100% better than the first edit.

A reflector could've been used here to good effect I think.

 

[Derrel]

Something seems fundamentally wrong with the photo. I guess that what happened to the exposure to make the top of her arm all discolored, was that you overexposed the highlight areas very badly, and then when you tried to "rescue" them, they were burned out too much to recover properly. I dunno...this doesn't look like it was "all that badly" messed up in-camera...can't figure out why the highlights are so oddly rendered.

 

[frommrstomommy]

much better but something is crazy with her skin .. b&w on this i think.

 

[frommrstomommy]

 

[Gavjenks]

Black and white is an excellent suggestion. Here's my stab at it:



1) Converted to B&W with a major reduction in the red channel to avoid all the issues there
2) Adjusted levels to trim the unused highlight space and increase contrast as much as possible without blowing out

That's it. I think it looks pretty good.

 

[ktan7]

You will need to get it right in-camera next time. Save the time for spending on photoshop to correct the face issue.