Beginner Critique: Forest Portrait

Oatcake

Oatcake

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Name
Matt
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Hi guys,

I'd like any critiques you have for me on this. It's one of my first portrait shoots. Taken at Wepre Park on a bank holiday walk. I've done a bit of post processing in LR and photoshop and went for a bit of a grainy film look given the low light it was taken in.

I probably should have asked her to push her glasses up her nose a bit, but that's how they always are so I didn't notice at the time!

Matt


Her Outdoors by Matthew Martin, on Flickr
 
I'd crop the right side a lot, bit of a green colour cast on her skin. I find the reflection on the glasses distracting & it means her eyes can't be seen clearly, but on the edge of her nose is kinda cute. :)
 
Thanks for that. Is there an easy way to remove glare from specs?
 
Glasses reflection doesn't bother me. That's what happens when you wear glasses. The frames themselves are bisecting her eyes anyway... that also happens. If you want a portrait of someone wearing glasses, so long as there's not a bright reflection obliterating her eyes, I wouldn't worry. If you remove all traces of reflections she'll look like she's wearing empty frames... which would be weird.

Some weird processing going on though... as there's always a great deal of green light being bounced around in a forest, any correction to counter this on a global level will result in magenta being present in the mid neutral tones, which you can see here in the ground.

Just done a quick edit using a quick mask to mask off the face... then a selective colour adjustment layer to bring back the lost magenta from all the green reflected light....

Watch in 1080P for clarity.

 
As Nick says, a crop from the right possibly to the middle fence post would help. Its a very nice portrait and David's excellent tutorial has improved the skin tones.

Andy
 
Oatcake said:
Thanks for that. Is there an easy way to remove glare from specs?
Click to expand...

Sorry, missed your post. I'm sure it's possible in PP (but beyond me), but perhaps a polariser during the shoot? A bit late now I know. ;)

Anyone else like to comment about the polariser/glasses thing?
 
Thanks David, Andy and Nick. I'm still at work unfortunately, so I'll watch the video when I get in and will have a play. I already cropped off the right part of the image to the post, I just didn't get around to reposting it. I wanted to see what other people suggested first. I'll make the edits and repost.

Cheers again!
 
Orange Elephant said:
Sorry, missed your post. I'm sure it's possible in PP (but beyond me), but perhaps a polariser during the shoot? A bit late now I know. ;)

Anyone else like to comment about the polariser/glasses thing?
Click to expand...

Yeah, a polariser probably would have helped but to be honest the forest was dark enough as it was, this image has already taken some heavy PP partly due to me stupidly under exposing it. I was trying to protect the highlights in the trees, but in hindsight I needn't have bothered - I had to really push the shadows to bring her face back. I could have sacrificed blowing the sunlight a bit to gain IQ on the subject.
 
No problem.
 
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