How can I improve this? C&C please.

[Babs]

I took this shot of my son today which I think would make a nice print for the grandparents for Christmas. However, I'm not sure if it's OK "as is" or whether I need to tweak it slightly. The more I look at it, the darker the RHS of his face becomes to me, and I worry what it'll look like in print (probably 10x8 size).

I'm a novice at photoshop, etc, so any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

(I have tried cropping it to remove his blurry left hand from the frame, but because it's quite a tight photo in the first place, it just looks unbalanced to me when I do that).

This is the original. No tweaks.

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/_babs_/5104463697/]
[/URL]

 

[Derrel]

Overlay the words, "2010: A Space Odyssey" on it...it'll look cute that way!

 

[Babs]

Overlay the words, "2010: A Space Odyssey" on it...it'll look cute that way!

 

[Derrel]

I was actually being totally serious about those exact words as an overlay...for some reason, that orange tone and the shimmering curtains or whatever give me a sort of space-age vibe...I think it would be adorable captioned that way.

http://www.google.com/images?client...le&resnum=8&ved=0CE0QsAQwBw&biw=1449&bih=1146

 

[gsgary]

Looks like he has been Tangoed

 

[Babs]

I was actually being totally serious about those exact words as an overlay...for some reason, that orange tone and the shimmering curtains or whatever give me a sort of space-age vibe...I think it would be adorable captioned that way.

Oh no, I totally see where you're coming from with it. I just have visions of the great-grandparents opening a copy of it on Christmas day and the ensuing questions keeping us occupied until Februrary!

Looks like he has been Tangoed

 

[KmH]

The photo you posted is enormous.

TPF askes that you resize photos before you post them - in this sticky thread: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...forum-functions-pictoral-guide-using-tpf.html

Resizing is just good netiquette:

You might also read this thread:

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...-gallery/183599-notice-image-sizes-forum.html

 

[reznap]

Beautiful photo by the way.

I think the color is just too much. There's too much orange and it's too saturated for me. I started by making a separate layer, converted to black and white with an orange filter (to make the orange appear white in monochrome). I then decreased opacity of that layer to 50%. Some dodging on the eyes to brighten them up, and then used the sharpen tool on them. Then I did some noise reduction, saved about 50% of the detail, strength at 10, sharpen details at 30%. I then resized to web dimensions and decided on this crop. I used the blur tool on the skin to soften it up a little and remove any leftover noise, careful not to hit the eyes or other spot where we wanted the detail saved. Minor minor vignette added and fiddled with the color balance just a tiny bit to cool it off a little (yellows to blues).

On that edit I tried to correct the color a bit more and I took some of the red out of the shirt.

 

[arcooke]

Nice edit. Did wonders for the original photo.

 

[Babs]

The photo you posted is enormous.

TPF askes that you resize photos before you post them

Thanks for that. I will certainly read and take note. However, in my defence, when I have previously posted re-sized pictures it has been commented upon that they've been too small to help with editing.

Beautiful photo by the way.

Thanks. And thanks for the help with the edit. He was, quite literally, surrounded by colour-changing fibre-optics, hence the over-saturation of the colour. I just didn't know where to start with it.

Thanks for the advice.



ETA - On the sizing ... when I see a photo in a thread on here, it has a banner saying the picture has been resized. Is this not standard functionality then? In which case I apologise as I was under the misapprehension the pictures were being automatically resized for posting. But maybe that's just how FF renders them.

 

[reznap]

ETA - On the sizing ... when I see a photo in a thread on here, it has a banner saying the picture has been resized. Is this not standard functionality then? In which case I apologise as I was under the misapprehension the pictures were being automatically resized for posting. But maybe that's just how FF renders them.

Yeah the forum does resize them but it also loads the whole file first at full size. For someone on a slow connection this can really bog down the forum.

 

[Babs]

ETA - On the sizing ... when I see a photo in a thread on here, it has a banner saying the picture has been resized. Is this not standard functionality then? In which case I apologise as I was under the misapprehension the pictures were being automatically resized for posting. But maybe that's just how FF renders them.

Yeah the forum does resize them but it also loads the whole file first at full size. For someone on a slow connection this can really bog down the forum.

Ahh - fair enough!

Well I shall go back to my original plan of posting Flickr medium pictures, and if anyone complains about that again I'll send them straight to KmH :lmao: