Hi all,

I just ran across a pic from yesterdays shooting and wonder how I could improve it. What I'm looking for is an idea on how to make the model in the middle stand out a little more...

I thought about blurring the rest, play with saturation, some lighting effects. Does someone have a quick idea what would be best AND still look natural?

Patrick

one possibility would be to cut her out about waist high as a selection, enlarge her and paste her back in. you might then have to sharpen her up a bit, though.

Craig

I painted a quick mask selection on the center model then adjusted the levels on the selection than ran Noise Ninja filter to sharpen her a bit.

Maybe not exactly quick (I've seen your posts about "speed" retouching), but I hope you find something interesting.

1) Crop - The lady is quite small in the middle of the photo, the crop makes her bigger and also eliminates a lot of distractions such as the lights to the right and lso the very bright left side as compared to the very dark right side.
The "other" people get pushed to the less significant edges of the photo and the lady now occupies a priveleged position.

2) Eliminate JPeg artifects - *;

3) Double sized - *, to get more pixels to play with;

4) Even up the lighting - at the end I want to use some Render>Lighting so best even up the photo so the lighting will work properly. Ended up using two Levels layers with right/left gradient masks. One to darken the lights and another to lighten the darks;

5) Even up saturation also;

Now with a balanced (rather uninteresting) photo we can make the central lady stand out by applying "standard" retouching methods masked to her only...

6) Rounding - * (masked);

7) Sharpening - * (masked);

8) "byRo" Brightness / Contrast - *, (masked);

and finally

9) Render>Lighting effects, central Omni on the lady, applied to a duplicate layer and opacity reduced until it looks natural.

phew! (took about 15 minutes)

Rô
* ten minute toolkit (http://www.retouchpro.com/resources/fileinfo.php?id=40) (for PS 7)

smart sharpen, radius 0.8, amount 100%;
shadow/highlight, default settings
feather-10 lasso of left third, lightness -5
feather-10 lasso of middle model, saturation and lightness +5
invert selection, saturation and lightness -5

This took about 5 minutes.

Hi byRo,

I am not always depending on speed, otherwise I wouldn't have time to post on the forums, right ;)

But I think you picked (incidentally) the perfect choice for this photo: I just crop out the girl on the left! It's not what I wanted but they fit pretty good together, the "pilot" and the one in the middle.

Cool, that's what I meant with "find some inspiration" ;)

Patrick

PS: Tell me how to upload the RAW here, and I'll show you a picture without artifacts ;)