Sunset Photoshoot With A Beautiful Girl

The_Saint

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My first time doing a shoot with a person, so i chose my girl to be my first subject.

I was unsure on what to use for the shoot, so i took my favorite things: Warm colours and sunsets, and I incorporated them into the shoot.

I didnt have any fill light, and didnt want to use flash, all i used was my canon 7d and the USM 15-85mm lens. I shot in RAW and used photoshop to bring in as much fill light as possible.

Quality is slightly low because of resizing and compression for upload.


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C+C please
 
i think these photos could have looked so much better had there been a bit of flash to light the subject. the background is well exposed for, but the subject doesn't draw my attention, which is a bit sad.
 
with some fill light these pictures would have been really nice.
i would to to use a selective tool and crank the exposure a little bit on the model.
 
These have the look of excessive Highlight/Shadow adjustment in post processing. There's a lowering of contrast that happens when this type of post processing adjustment is applied; I think what bothers me is that the color and tonal relationships do not look either 1) realistic and true to the type of lighting we know occurs in such scenes and 2) the results you show here do not have deep,true blacks.

Anyway...I just think that the way these images look is not the best way to portray sunset time...I would rather see "real" fill-in light, from flash, or higer-contrast images with deeper, darker shadows,even if it means sacrificing some details in the lower and lowest-middle tonal value areas.

What I sometimes do in this type of lighting is to use the Shadow/Highlight tool in Photoshop, but then manually re-tweak the Curves, to bring back some contraast and/or apply Unsharp Masking at like 15%, 150 Pixel Radius, 0 threshold (yes, those numbers are in order, trust me), and then Fade that to get more contrast, while still maintaining detail in both the highlights and the shadows.

I hope that someday soon, Adobe's Shadow/Highlight tool will be able to improve upon the wonky, flat colors it so often produces at the extreme application of its range.
 
These have the look of excessive Highlight/Shadow adjustment in post processing. There's a lowering of contrast that happens when this type of post processing adjustment is applied; I think what bothers me is that the color and tonal relationships do not look either 1) realistic and true to the type of lighting we know occurs in such scenes and 2) the results you show here do not have deep,true blacks.

Anyway...I just think that the way these images look is not the best way to portray sunset time...I would rather see "real" fill-in light, from flash, or higer-contrast images with deeper, darker shadows,even if it means sacrificing some details in the lower and lowest-middle tonal value areas.

What I sometimes do in this type of lighting is to use the Shadow/Highlight tool in Photoshop, but then manually re-tweak the Curves, to bring back some contraast and/or apply Unsharp Masking at like 15%, 150 Pixel Radius, 0 threshold (yes, those numbers are in order, trust me), and then Fade that to get more contrast, while still maintaining detail in both the highlights and the shadows.

The portion of your post I highlighted has peaked my interest.
I run into similar issues as in these images, and I usually try bracketing to resolve it. I like your process...I wonder if you could pop up a photo to be able to show this?
 

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