What can be done with this??

DeVore

I took this picture and its a mess.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78645925@N00/2814067645/

I took it with an F1.4 on a 400d by the way, and its at 100 ISO so I dunno how you can use that lens in the sun safely!

So, the pic is over exposed and the scene is organised badly but I really think there is a good picture in there that might be rescueable with a good crop and some clever digital-darkroom trickery!

What I thought might be fun is if a few people tried to polish it up in a simple manner and explain what they did and why and a few of us beginners might learn something

I will attempt something shortly myself!

DeV.

AnimalRights

I don't use PS or am one of the PP wizards that these boards possess but I'll start the ball rolling!
Dabbled in Lightroom and then in Canon DPP.
Original



By janer64

Great idea for a thread as I'm new to Lightroom and suck at PP.

Tactical

Here's a really quick attempt.

Pigwidgeon

i just did this quickly in lightroom.
cropped the girl out on the right so there's less going on.
darkend the highlights and applied a tone preset in lr. adjusted curves aswell.
it's still fairly over exposed though, someone else will probably do a better job than me.



EDIT: OP you don't have a raw file of it do you?

Perfect fit

Pigwidgeon

Perfect fit wrote: »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/perfectfitphotography/2814243263/

my attempt, not sure how to display the pic from flickr like you guys did tho:(

in flickr if you right click the image and select copy image location

then put [img][/img] tags on it and it'll come up

GhostInTheRuins

Very quick mess around, I just adjusted the levels,contrast,saturation and a tiny bit of shadow/highlight.

killbillvol2

Here's my effort.



It's a bit rough around the edges but you get the idea. I was going to reveal the girl totally but I like it better with just the face & shoulders.

Buzz Lightyear

OK here's what I done in LR

I under exposed the image by 3.3 stops
Increased the fill light by 20 to help lighten the boy's eyes

I also decreased the brightness by -18 to reduce the whites in the jackets of the two girls

I increased the saturation of the green, aqua and blue by +24, whilst the purple was increased by +7 and the magents by + 21.
All these were done to bring out the colours in the girls clothes, whilst helping to bring out the colours in the boy as well.

I put in a -29 for lens vignetting to darken the corners slightly, with the midpoint set to 18

The lightspot in the front of the lady lady's top at the rear was removed as well as the light spot in the backpack of the gent.

Hope this helps.

Larger image available by clicking on the image

gloobag

Mostly just a series of 'Curves' adjustments, an overlayed gaussian blur and some sharpening with the 'High Pass' filter in photoshop. The whites in the pic are completely blown out. Not much that can be done about that unfortunately.

Curran

Here's my quick attempt - 10 mins work - in photoshop.
Unsharpen Mask = Amount 150%, Radius 1, Threshold 10. (sharpen the image)
Exposure = Exposure -0.5, Offset +0.0255, Gamma Correction +0.75 (reduce the exposure)
Curves = pick point at 64,64 and changed to 54,64 & at 192,192 changed to 197,192 (give the image more pop)
Cropped the image = took some of the right hand side out - but the man's back pack was still in the pic!
Clone = cloned out the back pack and the blur behind the lil fellas ear!
Exposure = selected the lil fellas hair and reduce the exposure again a bit as it was shiny
Brush = Eyedropped the bread and tired to make its a lil more orange as it was washed out!



This is my first proper try at photoshop - only have it 3 weeks and spent that time trying to learn what all the buttons do - YouTube is a great help!

Deliverance XXV

Not a practical solution but just want to bring out the focal point. You cant miss it really. There is more work needed smoothing out the edges etc but I'm still hungover so my attention span is nil

Calina

DeV, I am not sure what you want to get out of this photograph so this is just an entirely random effort.

The whites are a bit overblown for me to get them back. I've had a go messing with the exposure and curves.

What I did with this was adjust the curves ever so slightly - if you have photoshop or any image processor with a curves tool, I pulled the curve slight down and to the right.

Then I used a quick selection tool to select everything except the three children and applied an adjustment layer to convert to black and white and left a slightly sepia tone on it.

Then I cropped the picture left and right and stuck a black frame on it.

I am sure that if I look at it tomorrow I may see something different.

KJ_2008

Think this photo would look really well in black and white - here's a very, very rough effort in Aperture, the Photoshoppers should do 110% better.

Weidii

...Wow.

kjt

Some nice edits!

Really quick mask


Used the mask from above to isolate the kids, multiplied the layers and then sphered them


A few levels, selective colouring and funky border

MagicMarker

My own attempt... I personally think it's a better shot uncropped. Plus i'm not aiming for anything other than fixing the over exposure.

DeVore, if you ever get your hands on photoshop then just stick within Image - Adjustments, play around with all the settings, it's actually pretty easy to get the hang of for something like this.

sineadw

I don't have time to process now, but I wanted to say DeV that it was just too bright to shoot at 1.4 (or even 1.8) - I should have told you to up it a bit and you would have gotten a much better idea of the lens. Oops - my bad. I'd rarely use it during the day wide open like that, except maybe for very close-up stuff.. Or if you're looking to get the lovely shallow depth of field on a shot like that you'd need to be setting the camera to underexpose to avoid the problems you were having..

Glad you had fun with it though, and give me a shout about the 1.8 if you want.

DeVore

Sinead, I will certainly take that nifty-fifty off you. I'll PM you.

In answer to some questions: I just thought it was a lovely pic that was ruined by over exposure and poor composition. I excuse myself because I was just snapping everything to see how the lens did (very well in fact but its a LOT less forgiving then the kit lens, thats ok because the results can be stunning!).

I wanted to take some more pics of him but I felt (and feel) awkward shooting young kids (as a single male ) plus you'd never get the spontaneity again...

I wanted to see what could be done with an almost but not quite ruined photo (plus to learn some tips and tools to use!).

I shoot in high def JPG, not RAW so I dont have the original but I did keep the original jpeg.


I'm really impressed with the efforts, I do use Photoshop myself and I'm reasonably handy with it too, so I'll have a go but I'm unbelievably busy just right now so I will try and get time tomorrow.

Thanks again all, I just wish the shot had been a bit better....

DeV.