critique this photo/editing please?

[LaurenW]

this is a photo i edited for a local band.. i didnt take the picture though

comments/critiques on the editing i did?

Before


After

[Swampy]

Lauren, I can't tell what editing you did without a before/after comparison.

[MrAlexajlex]

I like the fact that you brightened up the faces but you lost a lot of color in the sky and now it is not as deep blue as it was.

Try to mask the sky so it retains it's color.

The white clouds totally lost all their detail.
The girl in the forgergound has had her highlights in the hair blown out and completely gone (on the her left side of the hair where the sun was acting as a hair light). Masking would help here as well.

The girl's face needs a intermediate skin color on the left side where it is being lit by the sun. That half of her face goes from 1 color shade directly to another one. I would add another shade to smooth the transition. This may be a personal choice but seeing that you've already headed into the skin smoothing direction it only makes sense to do it to continue the trend.

[0lBaldy]

Looks to me as if you over smoothed.. and the girls flying hair should be cloned out of the guys neck above her..

Just a suggestion... bring out the shadows, sharpen a tad, then combined with a Draganizer action found here.

A quick version just to show what I mean

[sidhebeauty]

It seems that you might have used a bit too much contrast which blew out some of the highlight detail.

If you are using photoshop, duplicate the layer and change it to multiply mode. By masking everything but where the photo got blown out, you can bring back some of the color. You may need to mess around with the opacity and saturation of the layer though.

If you were to start from the beginning, I would recommend duplicating the layer, changing it to screen mode and masking all but the faces and other areas you want to lighten AND/OR Using the shadow/Highlight tool in advanced mode.

That's what I did here...

Also, the skin smoothing looks a little fake. Try a little add noise on the skin to make it less perfect and doll-like.

[duwayne]

Nice picture with a look of potention.

I don’t know if you are just trying to tweak the photo a little bit or trying to create an image for a poster. I like the version OlBaldy did. It has that desaturated look. I went the opposite way and used a new layer filled with 50% grey above the image and painted with white (10% opacity) to lighten the faces and a few other places. Blending mode set to Overlay. Then I used a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer to boost the saturation of all colors except red and yellow.

[smak]

The skin is smoothed out a little too much. The photo has a lot of potential. Looks like a shot of the Monkees or early Beatles. Experiment some and get some different renditions.

[bazza64]

Hi Lauren,

It looks like you have been getting some good advise, I agree with the others, to much contrast making the shadows to harsh, the sky and clouds are blown out and the girls face is a bit overdone.

Before I do any major work on a photo I always set the white balance first,
this gives your photo the correct colour to start with.

I create a levels adjustment layer to do this, with the levels histogram on the screen, hold down your alt key and put your mouse curser on the far left slider, when you do this the screen will go white, while holding the mouse button down slide the slider slowly to the right till you just get a bit of black on the screen then let go your mouse.

Now do the same to the far right slider, hold the alt key down, hold the mouse curser down and this will tirn the screen black, now move the slider to the left untill you just get a bit of white in the screen and let go of the mouse.

Now all thats left to do is adjust the gamma (center) slider to the left or right to finish the adjustment. then press OK.(The settings on my histogram were, left 16, middle 1.26, right 245).

The other thing to do is to soften the harsh shadows,
there are many ways you can do this but in this photo I'll show you an easy way.

Go up to Select->Color range, make sure that 'image' is selected at the bottom so that it shows you a color sample of your photo not black and white. Now with the eye dropper take sample of the shadow from under the girls chin and click OK. Your photo will have "marching ants" all over it, all you have to do now is create a Brightness/contrast adjustment layer, adjust the brightness up to approx +47 and thats it. You can play around with the adjustments to suit yourself.

I have not done anything else to the photo i've uploaded, I just wanted to show you some very basic white balance adjustments. You will find with Photoshop that there are many ways to do things.

I hope that I have helped you in some small way,

Barry.