Here's an image I snapped while shooting video on my Canon HF10 and I figured it made a pretty alright picture.
When shooting portraits, I almost always end up selecting and re-white balancing the teeth and/or eyes by themselves.
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Photo of the Day - August 2009
- Thread starter Phrasikleia
- Start date
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When shooting portraits, I almost always end up selecting and re-white balancing the teeth and/or eyes by themselves.
This is one of my (early) favorites from a recent road trip. While technically not a great photo due to the overexposed sky, I just love the smoke from the controlled fires rolling through the canyons being lit up by the setting sun. It was just my wife and I (+ camera of course) at this spot and it was quite magical for us both.
Shot on my Canon 5D mkII and the 24-70mm F/2.8L with a 0.9 graduated ND filter that gave some color and definition to the very bright (and still bright) sky. I find the cokin grad ND filters definitely give off a very red hue to sun set photos. I used F/6.3 to minimize the glare through the filter and glass
Is this better?
I used the lasso tool to circle the teeth and then went to selective color and got rid of the yellow and brightened the teeth a bit. Is there a better way to do it? Also how do you go about bringing out the color or sprucing up the color in someones eyes? Same way or do you do it differently.
Shot a Wedding Today...
Reeeeaaallly enjoying the 45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift (and, as always, my California Sunbounce!)
Canon EOS 20D :: 45 mm :: f 2.8 :: 1/800 sec :: iso 100 :: CA Sunbounce :: Added vignette in Aperture, everything else untouched
Reeeeaaallly enjoying the 45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift (and, as always, my California Sunbounce!)
Canon EOS 20D :: 45 mm :: f 2.8 :: 1/800 sec :: iso 100 :: CA Sunbounce :: Added vignette in Aperture, everything else untouched
It was just my wife and I (+ camera of course) at this spot and it was quite magical for us both.
Lovely shot, I like the overexposed sun
Is this better?
I used the lasso tool to circle the teeth and then went to selective color and got rid of the yellow and brightened the teeth a bit. Is there a better way to do it? Also how do you go about bringing out the color or sprucing up the color in someones eyes? Same way or do you do it differently.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I selectively saturate the eyes if I'm trying to punch their color. In Aperture I use the dodge and burn edit and the saturate brush.
Is this better?
I used the lasso tool to circle the teeth and then went to selective color and got rid of the yellow and brightened the teeth a bit. Is there a better way to do it? Also how do you go about bringing out the color or sprucing up the color in someones eyes? Same way or do you do it differently.
I generally select all the teeth, then go to levels and set a white point on the brightest part of the teeth with a yellow cast, that tends to even them up without looking strange, sometimes I'll also shift yellow to blue, but that's easy to overdo. For irises, I tend to select the iris and punch up the saturation there. Whites of the eyes if necessary I treat like the teeth.
Her overall tone is too yellow though- even her skin. I'd back the color balance over to blue on the highlights, the mid tones and the shadows. Then select her skin and do another set of adjustments, then the teeth again- lots of work, but I think that smile is worth it- I'd also clone out a few skin imperfections.
Hope you don't mind the attachment, if so let me know, but here's a quick run through of where I'd start trying to end up- probably still do a bit more de-yellowing on the bridge of the nose and her right eye (viewer's left.) I'd then re-add any warmth to the picture manually if you wanted to get some golden light in there- but this is where I'd start making final adjustments from. I backed down the overall exposure, shifted mid, high and low to blue some, selected the left (viewer's right) eye and took the yellow out of it, selected the irises and saturated/vivided them up, healing brushed out some skin stuff, selected the skin and shifted that a bit to blue too, selected the teeth and had a field day getting them to white, had to tone them down and lose some contrast too.
Obviously, this is just my own opinion, but the severe yellow of her teeth and eye make it look like there was a Ryder truck off to one side- and it's such a nice smile that it deserves to be brightened!
I find the magic wand tool to be easier to use if you play around with the tolerance as you're zoomed in, 9 worked pretty well for this image for most of it.
Attachments
This is one of my (early) favorites from a recent road trip. While technically not a great photo due to the overexposed sky, I just love the smoke from the controlled fires rolling through the canyons being lit up by the setting sun. It was just my wife and I (+ camera of course) at this spot and it was quite magical for us both.
Shot on my Canon 5D mkII and the 24-70mm F/2.8L with a 0.9 graduated ND filter that gave some color and definition to the very bright (and still bright) sky. I find the cokin grad ND filters definitely give off a very red hue to sun set photos. I used F/6.3 to minimize the glare through the filter and glass
glad its not just me w/ the Cokin 0.9 graduated ND Filter and the red cast on some sunsets.
nice shot by the way, I think the overexposing works well
Lovely view, tonyeck. I'd love to see that shot with a star-like solar flare, but I know that effect is difficult to produce. At any rate, the misty ridges look terrific.
A duck on the River Krka:
A duck on the River Krka:
I'm confused. Why spend so much time and energy trying to 'correct' the deficiencies in a pix, instead of spending just a little more time and energy, at the time of shooting, to create a worthwhile portrait? That is: instead of applying digital 'teeth whitener, maybe choose a location without distracting signs, people, etc...
Limestone pavement (nature's crazy paving)...
Whatever you did resulted in the colors of her skin tones to become less than desirable on my end. Her skin looked great in the original pic; teeth, not so much. The teeth look good but the skin shouldn't have been touched.
And as for the distracting pic, am I missing something? I thought the guy said this was a straight still capture from a video camera. I could be wrong.
Lovely view, tonyeck. I'd love to see that shot with a star-like solar flare, but I know that effect is difficult to produce. At any rate, the misty ridges look terrific.
A duck on the River Krka:
IMO, this needs some fill flash to light up her face from this side and provide a catchlight.
Outdoor bowling alley
Needs straightening- everything leans to one side.
I tried to clear up her skin- in the original her skin looked jaundiced to my eye, but as I said- that's close to where I'd start at, as it's toned down the reds and yellows enough that adjustments will affect the overall hue, not the spotty reds/yellows of the original. If you zoom in and adjust out the yellow while watching the image, I think you'll see what I mean.
Me too, which is why I said I'd probably re-add warmth manually. Initially, I just tried to clear up the skin a bit, but when I really looked, I saw how far to the yellow side it was and figured that getting it somewhere near flash neutral was a good starting point. That still didn't help the teeth or the whites of her eyes, but only parts of the eyes weren't white- which made me wonder if it weren't a reflection or camera artifact. I'd have tried to pink it up a bit, but the reds in the lower portion of the nose would have went all Bozo with that.
As it stands, you'd have to complete the de-yellowing of the other eye and bridge of the nose, then go to Image Adjustments, Photo Filters, add an 85 warming filter, but bump up the density from 25% to whatever looked good- then I'd think you'd be in a pretty good place.
I rather like it as it is. The panning puts the water-weed pleasantly out of focus, while the duck stops it becoming too abstract. It just creates a simple mood...
Adding a catchlight simply the viewer to "connect" with the subject, but if you just add the catchlight, it's a tiny bit unbalanced, so you need to lighten the head a bit too. IMO, adding the catchlight and brightening the face a bit on this side doesn't change the overall mood of the picture, it just adds a little emotional depth- the mood is the motion, balance and positioning, which all work well- adding the catchlight allows the viewer to not skim past the subject, but to see and connect with her emotionally. If you add a quick 2 pixel catchlight to the top forward part of the eye, then zoom back out, you can see what I mean (2px is too large at the current resolution, but it gives the right impression when it's zoomed back down.) It's just my opinion, but I'd really suggest doing the quick edit to see what I'm seeing.
I'm not sure I want to "connect" with a duck "emotionally". The last time it happened, it all ended in tears.
Sometimes a picture is what it is... reflecting what the photographer saw - and felt - at the moment the shutter was pressed. And this shot, for me, is one of them. But, hey, photography is all about opinions too... thank goodness...
Maybe this is why I spend so much time just 'hanging around', when I'm shooting pix, so I get emotionally involved in the process... rather than just pressing the shutter... in the hope that some of this emotion will be gathered up in those rather unemotional pixels.
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm just asking you to look at what I see. I shoot *lots* of birds, and I can tell you that the human eye is much more forgiving than the camera when it comes to seeing into dark spots- and I've got enough similar shots to be able to see the differences in my mind- but seriously, drop two white pixels into the image in Photoshop, zoom it back down and run your eye over the image again. I think you'll be surprised, and I'll bet even money that you'll see a slightly better view of what Phrasikleia wanted to capture. There's a reason that every pro nature photographer shells out for the outrageously expensive Wimberly flash bracket- shots like these are a big part of it.
If you're unwilling to even entertain seeing what others see, that's a sad thing. It's less than a minute's investment to get there.
Erm... to see things as others see them is the reason I take an interest in a photography forum...
I understand the way the light is coming, and that the bird's eye is on the shadowed side. So I would not expect to see a 'catchlight'.
Erm... to see things as others see them is the reason I take an interest in a photography forum...
I understand the way the light is coming, and that the bird's eye is on the shadowed side. So I would not expect to see a 'catchlight'.
Then compare the images with and without a catchlight at 67% in Photoshop- 100% is too large because of the resolution and relative size of the 1px pencil, but you can get what I'm seeing from just the catchlight.
I'm hesitant to keep uploading edited versions of people's shots... If you compare them, you'll suddenly see that the original image is devoid of life without the catchlight (zombie duck,) and I'm betting that Phrasikleia could see the duck's eye when she shot the original.
Just a few weeks ago, I shot a mute swan and cygnets and didn't have my Better Beamer and half my Wimberly bracket with me, and it kills me because the catchlight would have made the shots perfect, but without it they're mostly unusable.
Edit: It's mostly a psychological effect, just like humans aren't usually comfortable with a room that doesn't have at least two light sources. Being able to discern a live subject's eye or eyes is psychologically important to us, a catchlight provides that and therefore makes an image more pleasing to look at. There are obviously times when not as pleasing works for the emotion you want to project- but I don't think this is one of them (though obviously only Phrasikleia can say for sure.)