Practicing portraits..

[MLeeK]

I had to join in seeing how none of the edits did much of anything for me. They are a little bit flat which is almost making that second one look SLIGHTLY underexposed. All it needs is to have the curve adjusted, not the exposure or brightness at all.

Personally I like a nice, clean, contrasty look. I did dodge a little more sparkle in her eye. She has beautiful catch lights in there for you to use. Otherwise I did no other photoshop work on her. Her skin tone did have more greens in it than I would like to see, so I adjusted that as well.

 

[MLeeK]

Hmmmmm... flickr is NOT displaying the same color as photoshop again... Damned free accounts.

 

[MTVision]

I had to join in seeing how none of the edits did much of anything for me. They are a little bit flat which is almost making that second one look SLIGHTLY underexposed. All it needs is to have the curve adjusted, not the exposure or brightness at all.

Personally I like a nice, clean, contrasty look. I did dodge a little more sparkle in her eye. She has beautiful catch lights in there for you to use. Otherwise I did no other photoshop work on her. Her skin tone did have more greens in it than I would like to see, so I adjusted that as well.

It looks good!

 

[cgipson1]

Hmmmmm... flickr is NOT displaying the same color as photoshop again... Damned free accounts.

yep.. I saw the same thing! But I am not sure if it is Flickr or TPF...

 

[MLeeK]

Hmmmmm... flickr is NOT displaying the same color as photoshop again... Damned free accounts.

yep.. I saw the same thing! But I am not sure if it is Flickr or TPF...

It's a quite common problem with the free flickr accounts. Never had a problem when I bothered to pay for the stupid service. Now that I quit feeling the need to pay? Color troubles. Blech.

 

[TamiAz]

Flat-
A tad underexposed
Colours not very vibrant
Skin and clothing tones a little too close to the colour of the umbrella
Background and subject seem to run into each other
As mentioned adding a fill flash would have helped

Would it have helped to turn the subject a little so the light wasn't coming from the back? The background looks bright - so what I mean is too shoot into the shade but not have the subject in full sunlight if I'm making any sense.....

She was facing the sun...We were playing around in the middle of the day and I actually had my reflector out, but I had my daughter create the shade with it..LOL. It was hazy outside and the glare was really bad. We only have one green bush in our yard and I wanted that to be in the back ground, but she had to face the sun to do that. We kind of went with what we had and I tried to make it work.

 

[katerolla]

The portrait you took you did your best and it worked, with just slight adjustment the portrait looks great, a lot batter than a lot of so called professionals.
I don't know how long you've been shooting or your level of skill but if that was my portrait I would be proud to display it in my house. Well done keep shooting

 

[The_Traveler]

Typically, although it seems counter-intuitive, pictures taken in the sun or in direct shade, always seem cold - or too blue to me.
Additionally there is that magenta umbrella reflecting onto her skin.

So I think a little warming and removal of a bit of magenta makes it look better to me.

 

[luvmyfamily]

I saturated it a bity more because the umbrella/parasol is beautiful, the purple looked washed out to me. I also saw she had a blemish on her face, I prefer smooth skin, which some people like on here and some people dont.

 

[luvmyfamily]

I saturated this one a bit too....

 

[The_Traveler]

There is a truly excellent tutorial n fixing skin color balance at smugmug.

The one single thing they stress in even beginning appreciation of skin tone is the balance of the cyan, magenta and yellow.
On a very fair-skinned blonde, the skin values on a representative sample might be 13,28,33 (cyan, magenta, yellow) but on this young girl they are in the range of 3,9,9.

Clearly her face is underexposed, yet the colors in the background need to be treated differently.
Just pumping up the saturation across the board, in all color ranges, will not produce a good result.

 

[luvmyfamily]

There is a truly excellent tutorial n fixing skin color balance at smugmug.

The one single thing they stress in even beginning appreciation of skin tone is the balance of the cyan, magenta and yellow.
On a very fair-skinned blonde, the skin values on a representative sample might be 13,28,33 (cyan, magenta, yellow) but on this young girl they are in the range of 3,9,9.

Clearly her face is underexposed, yet the colors in the background need to be treated differently.
Just pumping up the saturation across the board, in all color ranges, will not produce a good result.

Excellent link. I bookmarked it. I mainly photograph people, so this was very helpful.:thumbup:

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Lighting is Easy Blog

^^^^^^^^^posing app there

 

[greybeard]

What I would do.

girl with umbrellow by GREYBEARD12, on Flickr

Very pretty girl.