Hurt me, beat me, teach me photography

mwgrice · September 21, 2005

Here's one of my favorite shots from my recent trip to China:

As a clueless amateur, I'm, uh, clueless about processing the photo after I've taken it (beyond the obvious things like cropping). What would you do to improve this image?

gtc · September 22, 2005

levelling
nice picture

being a bit of a "PS know nothing "myself all I can suggest is levelling the horizon-it looks a little tilted

you might want to play around with the other levels-autolevels usually does a pretty good job

greg

gus · September 22, 2005

Changed it to LAB & fooled with the curves & then put it back to RGB.

Im really hopeless with PS.

OneWayMule · September 22, 2005

First off, its a great image and the frame-within-the-frame composition is superb imo.

Post-processing will bring not only a visual pop but will add emotion to this photo. Though i'm an amateur myself, i have messed around with photoshop to tell you the following:

1) Decide how you want the picture to look/feel. This could be the hardest part and many times i wont know what i want till i start messing around on PS.

2) I would personally make the door darker yet bring out its character (i.e the texture & writing). But the door is a bit over-exposed and so is the scene within it. I would spend a lot time burning and dodging on the door. Messing with diff. blending modes (Dup. layer > change blending modes) will give you a good idea of what a "darker" door will look like.

3) The person in the back and part of the street also looks over-exposed. Local burning there will help but i would keep the glow there.

I know i was lost when i first started post-processing but its very very crucial imo. If you want, i can download and work on this pic on my free time and see what we can come up with.

Richard · September 22, 2005

mwgrice wrote:

Here's one of my favorite shots from my recent trip to China: As a clueless amateur, I'm, uh, clueless about processing the photo after I've taken it (beyond the obvious things like cropping). What would you do to improve this image?

Nice pic

thumb. I am a sucker for frames within frames. I have always found it hard to get the focus and exposure right on both the inner and outer frames. In this case, the problem is harder because of the areas of direct sunlight. Next time you shoot a similar pic you might want to set the exposure compensation to -1/3 or more, assuming your camera has that function. That might have prevented over-exposing the kid and parts of the inner frame, which is probably the main problem in this pic.

That said, there are some possibilities for improvement in post-processing here. As was pointed out above, what you get depends on what you want to do, but here's my quick stab at it:

I'm not a PS whiz, so the changes I made are not terribly sophisticated.
1. Cropped to make the inner frame more prominent.
2. Lowered the overall levels.
3. Used magnetic lasso with some quick-mask tweaks to select the inner frame.
4. Created an adjustment layer of the inner frame and set blending mode to multiply and opacity to about 50% to improve contast of kid. (this didn't work all that well, BTW)
5. Lowered the saturation of everything but the kid and the blankets in the inner frame. There wasn't much color there to begin with and sometimes I have had good results by exaggerating what I originally see as defects.
6. Boosted the saturation of the yellow in the sign on the wall.

I don't know that my version is better than the original, but hopefully it will show you some of the possibilites in post-processing. There are many useful discussions in Dgrin's Photoshop Shenanigans forum if you want to learn more about it.

Cheers,

GraphyFotoz · September 22, 2005

I'm no CS2 wiz either
But I enjoyed playing with this shot and this is what I came up with.

I'm a sucker for selective Color!

Either you like it or hate it I guess.

Was definately a great photo to play with one way or the other.

Old meets new

Or New meets old?

XO-Studios · September 22, 2005

mwgrice wrote:

Here's one of my favorite shots from my recent trip to China:

As a clueless amateur, I'm, uh, clueless about processing the photo after I've taken it (beyond the obvious things like cropping). What would you do to improve this image?

Ok I do not know the original colors, but they seem a little dull, just to show what can be done, see attached.

First action was a free transform to get rid of perspective (i.e. the vertical lines fanning out) and re cropped the picture.

Then I converted the picture to LAb and steepened both A and B curves

After that I selected the door only, and did some additional LAB adjustment to change the temperature of the 'red' a little.

I think the color change is too extreme, especially after seeing the original, but it gives an indication of what can be done.

XO,

DavidTO · September 22, 2005

Nice, XO.

If I had time to mess with that image (at work now), I'd try lowering the levels on the red wall. Overall, though, this has the most improvement, IMO.

I am in the "I hate selective color" camp.

Nice composition, MW. I like how the stuff to the top right of the door balances the boy in the courtyard.

wholenewlight · September 22, 2005

I like the picture but . . .

Pretty cool shot but as others have said, too much happening in the shot. The viewer's eye doesn't know what to look at.
I'm also not a real "selective color" junkie. For me it only works on limited shots - not yours, in my opinion
For me the cool part of your shot is the action that is happening behind the red wall/door. And the color of the wall competes with that action in the center. The red and detail of the wall/door overwhelm the young boy and hanging clothes part of the pic.
So . . . if it were my picture, I would work to tone down that dominating part of the picture with some a)masking, and b)exposure and c) levels control in photoshop or other photo processing program.

Here's my quick and dirty (don't look too close at my masking) take on your shot.

Keep posting your pics!

mwgrice · September 22, 2005

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll have to play around with it a bit.

mereimage · September 23, 2005

WNL-- i like your approach here/character to the door and attention to the action...............................................Mereimage

XO-Studios · September 23, 2005

wholenewlight wrote:

I like the picture but . . .
For me the cool part of your shot is the action that is happening behind the red wall/door. And the color of the wall competes with that action in the center. The red and detail of the wall/door overwhelm the young boy and hanging clothes part of the pic.

I normally would agree, but the scene behind the door doesn't really have enough 'focus' left on it for it to carry the picture, that made me choose the door as the main item. Perhaps if the picture would have had a DOF stretching all the way to the boy, but then again, most of our camera's don't come with f/64. ;=)

FWIW,

XO,

mwgrice · September 23, 2005

XO-Studios wrote:

I normally would agree, but the scene behind the door doesn't really have enough 'focus' left on it for it to carry the picture, that made me choose the door as the main item. Perhaps if the picture would have had a DOF stretching all the way to the boy, but then again, most of our camera's don't come with f/64. ;=)

FWIW,

XO,

When I took the picture, I was most interested in the door. I looked at anything inside the door as a bonus. I didn't realize the boy was there until I took the picture.

XO-Studios · September 23, 2005

mwgrice wrote:

When I took the picture, I was most interested in the door. I looked at anything inside the door as a bonus. I didn't realize the boy was there until I took the picture.

And that is what made me realy do a job on the door, I like the door, I believe it has so much color, wear, tear, texture, it carries the picture. The inside IMHO is indeed what you stated, bonus.

XO,

mwgrice · September 25, 2005

Is this any better?

Cantfeelmyfingers · November 7, 2005

I really like the original colour.. It looks a lot more real and believeable.. The only thing is that it does seem to sort of be on a tilt, but for me its not a huge deal. Really ncie picture though! Jamie

warszawski · November 11, 2005

my subjectif edit - better late than never
so, i am coming here a little bit late ... better late than never ...
what i did? shadow&highlights in RGB, then i went to LAB space (because of Dan Margulis :-) ), did some steeping in L a b channels, come back to RGB and think .... and i added, as i could, the "life" to the interior part of image... more saturation, dodge in the bottom, in final i like this edit ... one of trillions possibles ... but at the end congratulations to the author mwgrice of this shot:-) thank's to mwgrice and digital grin i could practice more :-)

DavidTO · November 11, 2005

I moved this thread because it's not really in keeping with the intent of the Whipping Post, it's more about post processing and is better kept here.

Hurt me, beat me, teach me photography

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