Friday, April 10, 2009

I Heart Faces - HELP ME!


What a great opportunity that I Heart Faces is giving to help answer some questions about a particular photo that needs "something." And if I can hurry I will be the 50th and last person to get the opportunity to get some "constructive feedback!!"

This photo was taken at sunset in Florida with an Olympus E500 camera using a 40-150mm lens. (Yes, I know it's not the best lens to have, but at the time it was all I had.) I shot in Aperture Priority mode with a f3.5, ISO of 640, sorry, don't know what the exposure timing was.

I love the thought of how great this photo could have been. Love the expression, love the sunset in the background. I was afraid to shoot with a flash because I thought that it would wash out the sunset. So, I guess my question would be how I get a portrait shot but still have a great background such as this without out the flash washing out the colors in background? Granted my editing sucks, too, but when I tried to brighten the subject, she turned out a funky color. When I tried to fix that, the whole picture just looked odd.

Any other suggestions and comments are totally welcome!!!! Thanks so much I Heart Faces!!

Here is the unedited version if anyone else wants to give it a shot! Thanks so much!



3 comments:

Tracy said...

here are four "fixes" I tried out. I wasn't able to keep the sunset as bright as I was hoping- I guess that's another question to ask the pros.

Drew said...

This is a tough one. I tried just selecting the girl and adjusting the levels on her. The problem is if the selection isn't perfect, then the transition between girl and sunset doesn't look right. Another option would be to bring it into the RAW editor and increase the fill light. Quite a few adjustments would have to be made after the fact, though, to make the skin tone look natural and to saturate the sunset more. I'm wondering if the dodge and burn tool would come in handy here. I have no experience with that at all. As far as in the camera, I really don't know what the answer is to that. I'm almost thinking you need some form of flash to capture details. A back lighting like this would render itself ideal for a silhouette.

Anonymous said...

Well a flash would have worked by changing the power or f stop to not wash out the subject. Alot of brands make speedlights that do a great job.

However, if you don't want to use a flash, the way to accomplish all of this is to use layers. One layer you can lighten up the girl and play around with highlights. Then the other layer you can do whatever you want to do with the sky but I think the sky isn't too bad. So then add a layer mask on the girl layer and brush out the sky layer to pull back in the original sky.

Good luck.
B Dad