Constructive tutorial (1) - "thomasrichards"

I was fortunate enough to have been invited to take a look and apply some constructive pointers to work produced by "thomasrichards", a member on the Cameralabs forum (see here).

Here is one of the two images he submitted in that forum:

I'll repost a precis of what I originally wrote:

"This image doesn't quite do it for me. One problem is that your model has been unflatteringly framed with too much space around her in the wrong places. There is a large space above her that takes a little focus away; yet it's understandable to keep background in as it's an outdoor portrait - you need that context. A little crop is needed. The tilted perspective does work well though (see here for my post on tilting) - other good things worth mentioning are the exposure, DoF, focus and the white balance.

The second issue is bigger and that's the lighting. There is a green tint caused by your surroundings (see my post on outdoor portraits here). In essence the trees act as giant green reflectors. But green tint aside, there isn't enough contrast in lighting between the model and the background; it lacks punch. So here are some pointers that you could try in post-processing:

- Cropping to a 4:3 ratio to get more width and reduce the height. The width gets the most out of the background with the converging lines (and it's an outdoor portrait, so we can't crop out all the background).

- Increase contrast between model and background by using several techinques that included the use of layer masks with brightness increase, contrast decreases and increases, levels adjustment, altered channels, high pass filters, warming filter, and diffuse glow."

This edit is my interpretation of what I thought would maximise the impact of the portrait.
























It appeared to be a popular edit and I've been inundated with requests on what I actually did. Rather than just telling you how, below is a short video that will go through all the steps I went through to obtain that end result.

The editing was done with Adobe Photoshop CS3 on an underpowered Asus Eee 901. You'll see the embarrassing "low disk space" warning during the clip. The resolution and volume also aren't impressive. However I hope it's clear enough what I've done and how you could do the same.

- a little oops. I just watched my video in completion and realised I'd forgotten to add a warming filter. The standard warming filter (86) at 11% is what I added to the edit I've posted above. This is a step missing at the end of the video. Also missing is a step I use when prepping an image for printing - sharpening it. I favour a method of duplicating the background layer and then placing a high pass filter - give it just enough so that you can faintly see the major outlines of the image under the grey - then overlay that layer over the background. If I have another chance to make a video tutorial again, I'll make sure I go through these.



Of course this is my interpretation on what I thought the image ought to look like. There may be differences in opinion, but this is photography!

Many thanks are owed to Thomas for kindly letting me use his image for this post.

NB: If there is a demand, I'd be happy to do a few more posts of this nature. All I ask is that if you are willing to submit an image for constructive criticism (and possible editing), please leave a link to your image in the comments section to this post.