Kid and soap bubbles

[ebyelyakov]

It is hard to judge your own work, especially when it has dear moments of your dear people but with your feedback I'm hoping to create even better images. Not afraid of any CC (and I do not mean congrats and compliments here)

The middle bubble has been composited to improve the composition.

 

[Jeff1547 47]

Nice shot......

 

[ebyelyakov]

Nice shot......

Thank you. Appreciate it.

 

[Granddad]

Lovely shot. I really like the way you caught the bubble on the left mid burst and I wouldn't have known you'd composited the middle bubble if you hadn't said.

My only two nitpicks are that A) it looks very slightly tilted to the right (unless all the trees are really leaning the same way) and B) The greens may possibly be a little too saturated, as I said, those are nitpicks but you did ask for critiques.

 

[ebyelyakov]

B) The greens may possibly be a little too saturated, as I said, those are nitpicks but you did ask for critiques.

Thank you. You are spot on about the greens, as well as all the other colours but skin, are indeed saturated -- I feel the same but the problem (I wasn't able to solve completely) here is, that tuning them down removes the lively vibrancy of the image altogether and I wasn't able to come up with another better way to convey the sheer feeling of crazy fun my daughter had chasing the bubbles. If there are any ideas of how to achieve a better balance without being that in the face obvious, I will appreciate those.

ps. capture was just lucky -- a good light, a decent lens, great AF and 10FPS

 

[Tropicalmemories]

Really nice, fun and energetic image!

Well done adding the extra bubble to balance the shot.

One option may be to boost the saturation, then selectively tone down the grass and trees?

 

[smoke665]

Great concept, well executed. The only thing I might do is turn down the composited bubble just a tad as it seems just a little brighter then the other.

Pentax tends to saturate greens, so I'm usually heavy in that area anyhow. In Lr, it's a little less complicated to fix. You have a slider for vibrancy and one for saturation allowing you to adjust indepently, and see your results instantly. Saturation will uniformly bump up the intensity of all colors in your shot, regardless of the starting point of the colors, which can result in clipping (over saturation of certain colors resulting in loss of details) and over saturation of skin tones leaving them looking too orange and unnatural. Vibrance is a smart-tool that increases the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors alone. Sort of like fill light, but for colors. Vibrance also prevents skin tones from becoming overly saturated and unnatural. In the HSL Panel you can use the targeted adjustment tool to click on and adjust the hue, saturation and luminance of a specific area quickly. One feature in Lr that I use frequently is Profiles because of the ability to change the look of the image independently of the sliders.

In Ps, you can do all of the above and more by using adjustment layers, with the added benefit of using a black mask, and then a white soft brush to reveal the effect in a targeted area. Sometimes in bright daylight the midtones can get a little drab and muddled I did a tutorial awhile back on a method I sometimes use to boost just the midtones without affecting highlights or shadows, Enhancing Midtones Only In Ps

 

[PJM]

Pure joy! Great shot!

 

[ebyelyakov]

Thank you for your time and feedback. Really appreciate it!

Not sure if the below is an improvement.

Used Vibrance/Saturation upping the Sat and dropping the vibrance. That was necessary to restore the sanity in neutrals and dial back some clipping.

I Colour Burned the mid bubble (and others) a bit -- Smoke is spot on that it was a bit too bright. Just painted with a soft brush. The use of Colour Burn was motivated by a desire to keep the contrast and leave the brights unaffected. Dropping the brightness via curves, considering the bubbles are bright was killing contrast that I didn't like.
A lazy mask from the Blue Channel used - it had the best separation for the bubbles.

Then in hue-sat shifted the yellows a bit (the green grass has identified by PS as yellow - so I didn't argue -- just shifted it a bit).

Then did a bit of curves upping the green a bit to balance of the redness (i.e. making it more yellow).

 

[ebyelyakov]

And then I decided to create a custom 3D LUT that shifted the greens and red's closer to each others wile keeping the skin and neutrals still, restoring the bubbles via a mask.

 

[ebyelyakov]

and here is the LUT itself. Hope someone else finds it useful.
Here what it does. Pinned are the neutrals and skin tones

 

[smoke665]

Cool, I have to try it. I've developed a nice library of both LUTs and Profiles, which I use frequently.