My two Girls. C&C wanted

[Davec223]

Evening one and all
Just thought that I would post this shot of my two girls I took the other weekend. As always I would appreciate any comments (good or bad.) I should just add that neither of the girls are particularly keen on having their photo taken.

Thanks for looking.

 

[InaGlo]

Awww! keen or not I think they look rather sweet!

I do think its a shame youve chopped fingers off, Id lose the hands completely or show all.
I also find the whites of their eyes showing from under the iris to be slightly unflattering to such lovely little faces, so would probably come in a little lower.

Im sure I read somewhere too, that its best for the subjects to wear similar colours or tones in portraits as one person's clothing can often drown out the other's and take over.

The skin tones look lovely on my monitor.

All jmho of course.

 

[Davec223]

Awww! keen or not I think they look rather sweet!

I do think its a shame youve chopped fingers off, Id lose the hands completely or show all.
I also find the whites of their eyes showing from under the iris to be slightly unflattering to such lovely little faces, so would probably come in a little lower.

Im sure I read somewhere too, that its best for the subjects to wear similar colours or tones in portraits as one person's clothing can often drown out the other's.

The skin tones look lovely on my monitor.

All jmho of course.

Thanks for the comments, fingers being chopped off is my fault.:bang: As for the clothes this was an unexpected sitting with both of them in the shot so this is what they had on and I didn't want to send them off to get changed.

Thanks Dave

 

[cjnicolai]

Dave, Glo's CC is right on. You've done a nice job, but particularly watching the whites of the eyes will help tremendously in future shots. Either lower your angle slightly, or encourage the girls to lift their chins slightly.

The light is quite nice. I do find the clothing a bit distracting, but to a certain point that's personal preference. I'm attaching the following crop to illustrate what a bit of fine tuning can do. My general advice (and Glo will find this familiar ) is that in portraiture, if it doesn't add to the image, it detracts. In this case, the half-hand at the bottom and the empty space at the top are distracting from the nice circular composition you've got going. You've also got some pretty obvious wrinkles in your backdrop; in the future, pulling your subjects further away from the backdrop and using a wider f-stop will prevent them from being obvious.

I've attached a rather quickly cropped version of your original.

- CJ

 

[CT]

I think that's a really nice shot and one you can be proud of. I agree with Glo about the hands being cut off. The hand of the girl on the right leads the eye down and out of the frame, so I've just done a suggested crop for you where the arm of the left girl makes a more natural looking base to the image and stops the eye wandering around?

Gave a it a bit of a sharpen too,

 

[CT]

LOL.

 

[Davec223]

Thanks for the comments and tips.
CT what sharpening do you use? I am trying using a high pass filter for sharpening and would be interested to know how others sharpen images. I am using elements 5.
Thanks again
Regards

Dave

 

[CT]

I just used the one-shot sharpen filter in Paint Shop Pro, Sometimes that's too severe and it's better to apply unsharp mask in small amounts. Your image was quite soft though so the one-shot filter was OK on this occasion.

High Pass sharpening is good and there are other methods you can use too. I prefer small amounts of USM applied incrementally as you can look for sharpening artifacts starting to appear - then you know you've gone too far and can undo a step or two.