Today at I Heart Faces it's Constructive Feedback Friday. I took this photo of my cousin Erin and her family for their Christmas Cards. It's great of them as a family but the color is really bothering me. The sunset was beautiful but I can't quite get it to connect with the photo. When I try to adjust the color it ends up making their skin look like they got really bad spray tans!
Can you help me I heart faces??? I took this photo with Erin's Canon Rebel XSI and I'm not quite sure what My settings were on, but I want some pretty colors!!
ps. I'm also curious how could I have placed Erin's family in order to make the sunset stand out more?? I'm thinking maybe place them somewhere without trees in the background so the sunset looks closer to them?? What do you think?
9 comments:
I still think it's a great picture.
I'm not one of the pros, but I think this is a great family shot. I think it's one of those situations where you can't have it all--the people are your subject, and you've got the color perfect on them. Beautiful. Bummer about the sunset. Shooting at that time of day, and with the natural light behind your subject, is a most challenging lighting situation. I do the same thing--wish I could have it all!
I'm looking at it once more--you need all of your exposure, but you might be able to get away with a little more saturation.
This is beautiful, Jenna!!
I just warmed it up a bunch, added some contrast, and put a peachy gradient at the top. Here's a link to my edit:
http://shortonwords.blogspot.com/2009/12/its-constructive-criticism-friday.html
Let me start by saying that I think it's a beautiful family photo. You did a great job and they look connected and happy - which is the whole goal. Now I'm going to critique it so you can keep some points in mind for next time.
First, they are so far from the tree line and there is so much field in between, it makes them look very large in proportion to the trees, which people expect to be bigger than people in photos. Also, the field lacks color and therefore isn't the best backdrop for a portrait. I would have put the baby in between the parents - it's a visual thing. The baby is blocking part of Mom, who is smaller than Dad, and it unbalances the photo.
All the photo needed editing-wise is a little pop and some color adjustment.
First I created a new curves layer and put points at 15/5, 56/36, 203/213, and 240/249. (Save this, it's a great s-curve for portraits!) Then I reduced the opacity of the layer to 30%. It made everything pop a little. (Flatten the image at this point.) Then I did quite a bit in hue/saturation. It is just a touch flat and sallow. First, I upped the Master saturation to +18. Under Red I increased the lightness to +3 so Dad didn't look so beet red. In Yellow I set the saturation to +40. It was great because it didn't affect the skin tones and it added some color to the field. In Cyan I set saturation to +5 and in Blue I set saturation to +7. Since the baby's dress was so vibrant, I wanted to try and balance that by making Dad's clothes stand out more. Then, just to touch on the sallowness, I went into Color Balance and shifted the Cyan/Red slider towards red +3 and the Yellow/Blue slider towards blue +3. Just a minor adjustment that I thought helped. Lastly I went to Brightness/Contrast and set brightness to +5 and contrast to +4. After that, I cropped in a little to bring the focus in some and tilted the crop to the right a bit to add a little more dynamic visual interest.
Here's the link to what I did.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43304125@N08/4195271125/
I think it's a great photo. I just played around with color sliders until I found what I wanted. Mess around a bit and see what you can create!
Liz had some awesome advice!
It looks like the sun was still a bit high for a sunset shot. When doing sunsets, you want the sun fairly low and fill light on your subjects. It's almost a tit for tat type thing when capturing sunsets.
If you have your settings to expose the people/subjects, you're going to blow out the sky, like happened here. If you expose the sunset, your subjects are too dark. Using the flash would of cured that perfectly!
I'm going to start from the front and work my way back.
First, I would have had baby sitting on dads right leg, so she was in between mom and dad if you were going to have them all standing. Another idea would be to have mom hold baby and dad stand behind them and lean down on the bench. You could also have had baby stand on the bench with mom and dad standing behind and leaning in around her.
They are REALLY far away from the trees. It is very disproportionate. Not to mention the tree growing out of dad's head. In this photo it would have been easy to use the paintbrush tool and just color over the tree with white, but you definitely want to watch for things growing out of people's heads when taking their photos.
As for the sunset, I would have taken the photo earlier in the evening. Probably JUST after the sun went behind the trees.... This would have allowed there still to be color in the sky... especially if there were clouds, and would have helped eliminate the blue outline around the trees. or you could have waited longer for the sun to go completely below the horizon... Also, shooting in manual mode and exposing your shot to compensate for the different lighting would have helped.
Since it was a Christmas card photo, I probably would have placed them in a pose that brought them closer together, and came in much closer with your camera/lens. It would have taken a lot of the distraction of the small trees and white sky out of the photo and brought more of the attention onto the family, making for a "cosier" family portrait!!
Hi Jenna,
You have received so much wonderful advice already on how you could have improved your photo before you even took it. So, I am just going to share what I did to help give your photo a little more color and vibrancy.
I live in Ohio and our sky looks exactly like the sky in your photo all the time now. Ohio is very dreary, gray and overcast during the winter months. Due to this, I've had a lot of practice adding some color back into my photos during the editing process. LOL!
I added color to yours by using an overlay from Kaleidoscope by Patti Brown and by using an action from MCP Actions (you can find both of these companies on our I Heart Faces Resources page - http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/2008/01/resources.html). From Kaleidoscope I used her Sunny Marsh background and from MCP Actions I used her "Bag of Tricks" action that allows you to make the sky look like it has a sunset in it.
Here is my edited fix if you'd like to take a peek: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thearthurclan/4197825346/
I agreed with some of the other comments as well in that the background really isn't that pretty so I chose to crop in closer on the family so that more of the focus is on them.
I hope this helps! Thanks for letting me play with your photo today. :)
~Angie
co-founder of I ♥ Faces
Wow, you got a lot of great help! Good for you! Nice to get the good ideas.
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