Critique Out on a limb

Morbid

Morbid

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Ian
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Yet another one of my son - sorry!

Using fill flash, which I've only recently started trying, so this was bit of an experiment really. 70D with 17-40mm F4 L

  • ƒ/4.5
  • 35.0 mm
  • 1/250
  • ISO 100
  • Flash (on, fired) - using YN600EX-RT (which I've only had a short time, but have been very impressed with for the money) - set to -3 FEC from memory.

IMG_0701 by Ian J Bradshaw, on Flickr

He's only just one, so mum had hold of him and has been cloned out.

Any C&C would be appreciated.

Thanks for looking.
 
Morbid said:
radshaw, on Flickr

He's only just one, so mum had hold of him and has been cloned out.
Click to expand...

Phew! Scared the beegeezus out of me, that did! lol! Good job on the cloning!

Fab image, nice balance of ambient and flash! I'd be happy with that for sure!

Very cute kid too!
 
Great use of the flash, nice colours without being too hot, enough to pop a catchlight in the little mans eyes as well.
Much better clone activity than me.
 
@sunnyside_up. Bethy,apologies for the scare! Thanks for the kind words and taking the time to comment - I love your work so this has made my day!

@reheat module, thanks for the positive comments, means a lot too.

@UaeExile, thanks for your feedback too, also means a lot. Your monitor is fine you'll be pleased to hear,the little man has my olive complexion.

Re the cloning, I discovered a little trick when doing this that seems obvious once you do it. Makes getting clean edges a cinch and makes the whole process really quick. Happy to share if anyone is interested?
 
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Morbid said:
Re the cloning, I discovered a little trick when doing this that seems obvious once you do it. Makes getting clean edges a cinch and makes the whole process really quick. Happy to share if anyone is interested?[/USER]
Click to expand...

Go on then, whatcha got to share? :)
 
OK Bethy, it's not rocket science, and I'm sure someone has already worked this out before.

I always found getting a decent edge (say along a sleeve) difficult and time consuming when cloning 'freehand' so I thought about using selected areas only.

1. Select the area next to where you need to clone, the sleeve in the shot above for example, using the magic wand tool.

2. Then inverse the selection.

3. Select the clone stamp tool, select another area on the picture which is close to what you want to paint in (colour/texture) and sample using Alt and mouse click.

4. Brush over the area you want to clone out without worrying about going over the edge because only the area that is within the selection is affected.

5. A little bit of tidying up may be needed depending on how well the initial selection worked.

This worked well in the shot above as there was a very distinct difference between the red sleeve I wanted to leave unaltered and the dark blue of my fiancées sleeve. Getting a clean edge on the selection is key really. It took about 2 to 3 minutes compared to probably 20 minutes trying to do it freehand and the results are much better than I can manage doing it freehand.
 
juggler said:
The edge selection is one of those doh! things once you've found it...

The cloning's really very good; there are no obvious repeating patterns at all and that's very easy to get wrong.



Mine too; WB a bit off?
Click to expand...
I think so. Greens look a little warm too, so pretty sure it's no just the olive skin (or more importantly my monitor!) :D
 
juggler said:
The edge selection is one of those doh! things once you've found it...

The cloning's really very good; there are no obvious repeating patterns at all and that's very easy to get wrong.

Mine too; WB a bit off?
Click to expand...

Definitley a "doh" moment - glad it finally dawned on me to try it.

Mmm...it must be my monitor then (cheap laptop and crap work monitor does not make for accurate viewing of images) or my eyes. I'll take a look at what the WB and tint settings are in the DNG fiile and see if I can see what I've ballsed up! Thanks for commenting on this Simon, I wouldn't have known otherwise.

UaeExile said:
I think so. Greens look a little warm too, so pretty sure it's no just the olive skin (or more importantly my monitor!) :D
Click to expand...

Thanks Adam, as above I'll take a look later, and thanks for commenting. Too much yellow in the greens do you think? This may be hard for me to sort given the challenges with dodgy monitors (or possibly dodgy eyes!)...
 
@juggler and @UaeExile

Simon/Adam - this is the original DNG file with WB set to 5500 and zero tint (all other settings unchanged). Does this look better to you guys?

IMG_0701Daylight WB by Ian J Bradshaw, on Flickr

ETA - I found a monitor tool in the Control Panel on my laptop (SiS VGA Control Centre) which I didn't know about. I've changed the setting from 'uncalibrated' to 'Europe Proof' and I think this might help matters, I can certainly see a clear difference between the two versions which I couldn't before. Thanks again - you both have a good eye, as they say (odd saying I'm sure you both have two good eyes!).

I'm not sure this is the best way to calibrate a monitor, but I'll see how I get on. I also have an old NEC LCD monitor and have just tried this again and it's way better than the laptop screen so I will use this from now on (have also changed the settings to 'Europe Proofing' on this. I used to use this when working from home and haven't really used it when photo editing - I will now!
 
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Tha's a little better but it still seems a bit off. I don't really have time now but I had a very quick play on my calibrated screen, this still isn't quite right and you can't really do this to jpegs anyway but this is closer. There's probably too much pink in the skin tones.

You'd need a Spyder device to calibrate your screen properly. I'd recommend getting one which does ambient light compensation but even the cheapest model is worth having.
I'll dig out a couple of articles I've got on getting skin tones right if I remember.

ForMorbid.jpg


Edit: not sure why the image isn't appearing, try
https://copy.com/thumbs/ForMorbid.jpg?size=1024&revision=147
 
Thanks Simon, I'll look into Spyder. I'm getting an error message from that link, would be interested to compare your version which what I've done. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
 
And I've just found the links I bookmarked on skin tone correction - I realised I had to do something after producing a completely California-tan coloured image for a model friend.

Use, ignore or adapt these as you think fit. Crudely, if the RGB values are evenly spaced then you're about right. However there is more disagreement on this topic than almost any other in photoshoppery, so take it all with a pinch of salt.

PS
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRSCoFjGajM

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93363-how-do-i-correct-skin-tones-

LR
http://pixelationblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/correcting-skin-color-skin-tones-in-lightroom/
 
@juggler Thanks Simon, I can clearly see the difference (and how yellow the little man looks in both of my attempts when compared to your edit). That's a useful tutorial, I'll have a go at following this on the same image and see how I get on.

Thanks again for going to the trouble you have, it's appreciated.
 
You're entirely welcome.

FWIW my quick fix did not involve any messing about with curves. I fired up Color Efex Pro, selected the Pro Contrast filter and whanged the 'remove colour cast' slider up a bit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the White Neutralizer filter does a good job. Sometimes they don't.

It's clearly better to try to get this stuff right in the raw file but it's important to pretend to have learnt all the stuff in those tutorials off by heart ;)
 
I did edit the shot but due to uploading a backlog of around 200 shots and a couple of videos to Flickr (as the upload facility has been playing up recently) I've not uploaded it yet.

This is another shot taken over the weekend using flash during the day to reduce the shadows. I think the skin colour looks fine in this (with my old eyes and uncalibrated monitor) and I think I may have just had incorrect WB in the original shot above. Any thoughts?

IMG_1503 by Ian J Bradshaw, on Flickr
 
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