Daughter by Pool

I like the black and white one!
 
#1
You said it unless it is done right. Mall photo places need to put out the product and move on.

When I say done right, I think I've seen, maybe a half dozen shots where the selective coloring was actually good, and added to the shot, and not a single one was a portrait. As I've said all along, this is just my opinion. I still cannot think of a single good use of selective coloring in a portrait that doesn't immediately trigger thoughts of the mall portrait factory. There was a shot recently of a pregnant woman where a tattoo near her belly was selective colored that I thought wasn't bad, but the all color version was still far better than the selective colored version.

#2 Film or digital, image needs to be processed to reflect what photographer sees or wants to see in his image.

The image above is overexposed. It is easier to correct underexposure then over exposure. You can only do so much by boost contrast, dodge, crop, etc but unfortunately some details are lost. At times like these, you get a bit creative and selective coloring is a basic example of creativity and start editing it to save/make the image more pleasurable :) You want to take it a step further, you cut out the pool and everything around the girl and put her on some cloud. Sky is the limit.

I agree, the shot is overexposed. But the solution to fixing over exposure isn't to cover up the mistake by using photoshop tricks. My mantra is, Photoshop can only be used to make a good photo better, it can't be used to make a bad photo good. In all honesty, it's not a great shot, because of the overexposure. There are about 100 good things going for that shot, but the one bad thing (overexposure) has ruined it, unfortunately. People here have been able to improve on it a bit, but you still have that glaring blown out area which cannot be fixed in Photoshop, no matter how good you are at it. I would argue about whether selective coloring is really creative or not, but that's a different debate, for a different time. :sexywink:

Bottom line, all the photoshop tricks in the world cannot make this a great shot. The only real solution is for the OP to learn from some of the mistakes of the shot, and re-shoot, which just so happened to be my suggestion.
 
lol
this is funny - we are both saying the same thing just from different perspective :thumbup:
 
Well, actually, with layers, you could fix it- you add in a nice blue sky and lay the image over it and now there's blue. It takes work and I've never been able to really do it, but I've seen some great examples. Look at every picture you've seen of a night scene where everything is properly lit... and a well-defined moon. It's one picture overlayed on another.
 
"burning the edge of the pool and her jumper"


How do you do that? what is that effect? To me the shot looks dark now. Maybe it because I'm used to the lighter shot.

I like it though.


I'd suggest another point: Monitor Calibration
 
Good morning guys and Gals,

I took this by the pool in LA. I think it is washed out but I wife really likes it because it does bring out the blue in her eyes. What do you guys think? Feel free to play around with it. If you do please tell me what you did so I can learn.

F/7.1
Exposure time:1/100
Focal Length 60

_CDG5331small.jpg


Thanks a bunch.
Just for giggles:

onesix_daugher_by_pool.jpg


What I did: Cropped and extracted, placed on stock background, pushed saturation selectively, added a bit of false shadow and lighting from above onto stock background, added a vignette effect, sharpened eyes, lips and hair.
 

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