My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

[gennarof]

Shot with Nikon D800 in raw. Nikon 28 -300mm at F5.6 iso 500. 3 sb800 speed lites, one shoot through unbrella a back light and one soft fill. Main strobe with shoot through and back light set to manual and fill set to ttl. (each radio controlled. Cropped through adobe light room 5 post processed through Adobe photoshop with imagenomic portraiture plugin.

Any Feed back would be appreciated. My first paid shoot on location.

[Mike]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

Kind of hard to tell with such a small image but here is what I noticed:

Not really in love with the adults (mothers?) hand on her back

The girls hand is in the wrong place, it appears too large, its lighter than her face so ones eyes go to it first rather than the girls face. Her shoulder also does this as it to is very light in comparison to the face.

Not sure what the lighter object in the background is, it looks like its maybe growing out of her head? Its distracting to me.

Anyway, you asked and that's my opinion, but the only opinion that really matters is the person who is writing the check to pay for this 8-)

[gennarof]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

Kind of hard to tell with such a small image but here is what I noticed:

Not really in love with the adults (mothers?) hand on her back

The girls hand is in the wrong place, it appears too large, its lighter than her face so ones eyes go to it first rather than the girls face. Her shoulder also does this as it to is very light in comparison to the face.

Not sure what the lighter object in the background is, it looks like its maybe growing out of her head? Its distracting to me.

Anyway, you asked and that's my opinion, but the only opinion that really matters is the person who is writing the check to pay for this 8-)

Thanks for taking the the time to provide the feed back Mike.
One Question Please... When you say image is to small does that mean thumbnail is to small or the 1024 x 768 image that opens when I click on the thumbnail is to small.

Thanks again for taking the time.

[klev]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

You have some problems around the girl's hair. This will definitely show in larger reproductions of the image. Otherwise some people might not notice. I tend to color correct the whites of the eyes. They go a bit more cyan here than one might naturally expect. I would personally bring some consistency to the color palette of the skintones and hair. Right now they're all over the place. I'm a little hesitant to write that, because I don't mean it should be all one color, just that you may not want three different casts in the highlights or shadows. Naturally the brighter the highlight, the more you should see the color of the initial incidental light. In this case the girl's skin is mostly warm in tone. It has a couple distracting patches due to reflections from the red dresses. The woman's arm is much colder in tone. I would probably equalize that somewhat. I might make the face a little closer in tone to the arm. I like the warmer tone. The eyes are quite soft here. Sharpening them would probably look weird. If it was me, I would paint down a couple areas to bring greater focus there and give the illusion of sharpness. I'm not sure what's going on toward the back of the dress and around the hand. Those little lines on the background are distracting. On one last note, you probably need to make a separate pass on raw processing for those dresses. Without even bringing it into photoshop, I can tell you're clipping detail there. It's usually better to lose saturation than detail, and the dresses are too bold anyway. They are distracting relative to the girl's face, so I don't think the saturation issue would be a big loss. The thing is you may need to mask that in for the dress. You can really see the problem around the fingers, where there's a big hue shift because you're drifting out of gamut. There are a couple smaller/unnecessary wrinkles that I would have cleaned up on the dresses, but they're a more minor detail than this other stuff.

I would also suggest you do yourself a favor and avoid those silly portraiture plugins. It makes me want to bang my head against the desk when people suggest it saves them hours on a single image, because it means they just have to be a little more selective on what is considered an actual flaw. Looking at this again, I also dislike the placement of catchlights. You have the potential for nice shadows, but I don't think it worked that well here. On a better note, the improvements could be really fast at this level.

[Mike Needham]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

Also not a fan of the portraiture treatment, and in this case it has been a little heavy handed, most evident around the girls face. I would say minimal d&b your preferred way and perhaps a tidy/neaten of the background on our left of the image.

[gennarof]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

Thanks Klev and Mike N.

I reworked the image and cleaned up everything I could see based on the feed back.

I lowered the contrast to clear up the out of gamut (reds) got rid of the color casts ( I believe) toned down the brightness of the hand and sholder. Sharpened the eyes a tad, and totally blurred out the background on the left of the child. I think it looks much better and draws the viewer more directly to the child's Face. I know the hand around the child's back looks a bit obscure but it speaks to the bond between the mother and child.

Please let me know if attached is a better rendition.

Thanks

[klev]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

You misunderstood part of that. First if there are detail issues in something that saturated, the lowered saturation has to be done before you process out that raw to a point where you maintain detail in the garments and don't fall into weird patchy shifts. If you can't see it yourself, take the eyedropper tool. You're not supposed to end up with clipping in green or blue. It causes weird problems, and you have to learn to see that. Once you do, it will look hideous to you, and you'll fix these things immediately.

You also must be able to see the problems where the subjects meet the background. It's a black line that goes around her. It's made worse by the fact that the line is very sharp against an out of focus background. I don't know if it's a problem of masking or that plugin you use. Either way I would never hand that off to a client.

Regarding skin colors, I was suggesting that the really cold skintones be warmed up a bit to match the warmer ones, for a bit more consistency. It's natural for the balance to be different in shadows and highlights depending on the color of what something is reflecting, but it's in a bad way right now.

This is something I would start from scratch. It doesn't take hours either. If you are inexperienced with the post work, it might take an hour. Any longer than that and you should re-examine your methods and what you look for in the image, as allowing time to get out of hand will kill your business model. The woman's arm and stuff requires a bit of soft masking to make subtle color correction and bring things more in line. If you can't see the issues with color, turn off all lights to guard your display from reflections. If you still can't see it, make a print check if you have an inkjet there. Right now this is still less than half of what it should be, which suggests to me that you've been staring at it too long. I suggest a break. If you're having specific technical problems (such as can't mask the arm without that line) and can quantify them, I will tell you how I would approach them.

[Repairman]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

Klev has covered the ground well and I can only add 2 cents. I think the picture has a lot of charm but would have benefitted by adopting an 'old school' approach. The lighting would have worked better had it caught her face rather than the cheek, shoulder and fingers. The shift in lighting emphasis has left you back-pedalling to recover the main point of interest (or at least diluted the narrative impact) and by extension, given you more work to do on the peripheral area. Rule 1 of Retouching is "First, start with a great picture!"

[RCraig]

Re: My First Shoot For Money Critique Please

from an amateur - your reworked picture looks quite great to me.