Family Duckface Photo

[Granddad]

We visited the grandchildren (and their dad) on Saturday; C&C welcome.

 

[The_Traveler]

Cute picture, nice looking children.

I think that all the light is coming from their right and so their right sides are bright and their left sides are too dark.
Evening it up and cleaning up the background (which is way too bright) gives a more even result, I think.

 

[Granddad]

OK Traveler, I did the white background in Lightroom because it was a wrinkled sheet and yes, the light was from the left with on camera flash set to 1/16th for fill (obviously set too low)... limited resources away from home and kids who were fast losing interest.

Your edit is much better :thumbup:, how did you do that?? I'm still a novice with Lightroom and Photoshop

 

[The_Traveler]

I selected and copied the people to a new layer.
Then made a new fill layer with a nice quiet grey and put that in below the people.

Then I selected with slightly feathered selection, each of these 4 areas and put them onto separate layers.

Area 1 was too bright and was darkened using a curves layer
Area 2 was OK
Area 3 was too dark so I lightened it. "
Area 4 seemed OK

Then I merged the people layers and did local contrast enhancement (you can look that up), then merged that with background.

 

[Granddad]

Great, thanks. I think I can figure that out. I should have some time to try it this evening.

You are a gentleman and a scholar, Sir.

 

[The_Traveler]

Since you will have lots of things on different layers, this is a good time to try all the different ways of making areas lighter - brightness/contrast layer, dodge & burn on a neutral gray layer, curves layer.

Lew