[mikemike]

Original Picture came out kind of dark...


I am trying this out with a new printer that I had a groupon for and here's what the photo finisher did to it, I don't like it because first of all they didn't fix the moving hands and second because the greens look neon and the whole thing is glowing like the picture was taken at Fukashima.


So I took a crack at it and fixed the hand, colors, and boosted the contrast using GIMP.


The faces were still a little dark and I couldn't boost the brightness on the whole thing without getting the neon green look so I made two more layers to do contrast masks, one for the people and one for the background and I brightened the background slightly and the people more.


Any tips to make this any better would be appreciated...
My retouching skills are pretty novice.

Thanks!

[Ash]

In hindsight, f/8 with a shutter speed of 1/100 would have given both better IQ as well as eliminate the possibility of motion blur.

On PP, the original has preserved all the highlights and looks good to process. The versions you've given are very strong and as a result has clipped a lot of the highlights, giving it a somewhat washed out look. Perhaps don't go overboard with the contrast and saturation sliders, just focus more on using levels and curves to make the image more punchy, using the histogram as guidance.

[mikemike]

In hindsight, f/8 with a shutter speed of 1/100 would have given both better IQ as well as eliminate the possibility of motion blur.

On PP, the original has preserved all the highlights and looks good to process. The versions you've given are very strong and as a result has clipped a lot of the highlights, giving it a somewhat washed out look. Perhaps don't go overboard with the contrast and saturation sliders, just focus more on using levels and curves to make the image more punchy, using the histogram as guidance.

It was a very sunny day and for this shot there happened to be a cloud passing overhead. I did end up turning off highlight corrections and dialing down to 5.6 a few shots later this was just one of the earlier shots... But yeah it would have been nice if there wasn't any motion blur. Luckily I had a couple of good reference shots where everyone stayed still but not everyone had their eyes open.

I went back to the original background image and let the contrast mask do all the work, anytime I touched the levels or colors I was blowing highlights in the white pants.

[Ash]

This might be an application for the Lo-speed continuous shooting mode.
4fps may be a little too fast, but 1.5-2fps means that in one pose, you can get 2 or 3 images to maximise the probability of getting everyone looking right with open eyes and still enough to avoid blur.

Depending on oyur PP program, you can use the equivalent of a shadow/highlight treatment to enhance highlight and shadow detail without affecting clarity too much. Then you can apply levels without blowing the important highlights out very much and get a more contrasting result. You can also use a tool like selective colouring to perhaps reduce the intensity of the reds (adding some cyan to the red channel) and darkening the greens and blues that are nearly clipping (or are clipping) in the image.

[D4rknezz]

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Hello Mike, I hope you dont mind, but i took a stab at it. Basically, a one two punch at balancing the highlights/lights/shadows/darker areas, plus tweaking the saturation a little, and finally, gave it a little sharpen.

Nothing overly complicated, just needing to find the right combo. Well, I think it makes the photo stand out a little more. Cheers

[twitch]

The peoples faces all look similairly very soft to me, whereas the background plants look sharper. To me it doesn't just look like motion blur (although undoubtly there is some of that) but rather a case of missed focus (yes it is possible even at f/16). That kind of background will fool a camera AF (on auto-11) as the background is very contrasty and textured.

My 2c therefore is to reevaluate your focus technique. Many use AF-S centre focus point only, focus and recompose.

Also f16 is past the point where diffraction has well and truely kicked in, unless you absolutely need it for DOF (and this photo certainly didn't) don't use such a small aperture.

Also 1/45 is far too slow for sharp photos of people, ideally you should be 1/160, for kids even faster. I don't care what the focal length is either, I think the 1/FL shutter speed rule of thumb that's gets routinely cited is far far to slow for sharp photos for any focal lengths except super telephoto.

[mikemike]

The garden group picture came out okay but these two came out nicer...

[twitch]

The second one looks good to be, but since this is in the critique forum I'll point out the first one is focused on the fountain and not the little girl, not sure if that was your intention though, I suspect probably not. I'm curious whether you are using auto-11 points for AF, or whether you are using centre point focus & recompose, or some other method?

[mischivo]

It's not a printer's job to fix motion blur in hands that is a result of the photographer's lacking attention. I'm not even sure how you would go about fixing it... there is no detail in motion blur.

Some questions to mull over:
Why didn't you notice it was dark after the image was taken?
Why didn't you notice the motion blur after the image was taken?
Why didn't you tell your subjects to quit moving for a split of a second?
Was this manual or automagically exposed?
Why on earth are you using F16? The subjects are lost in the noise of the background. In such a situation, giving the background some depth would've helped.
Was this saved as JPEG or RAW? Use RAW. It preserves MUCH more detail, which is something you should be concerned with if you're prone to basic exposure errors. You could stretch the information into something acceptable. It may also assist you with colour fidelity.
If the colours are too toxic, which they are in all of the "corrected" shots, lose the saturation.