The Original
The EditThis photo was shot at f/4.0 1/5o sec ISO 400 22.4mm
I like the photo, taken of my grandmother last week on her 81st birthday. I edited just a tad with PSE for a little more background blur and slight color adjustment. But it doesn't seem to "pop". Any feedback?
I love this photo. Your grandma looks so relaxed and happy. What I don't love is the background. :) Darn those fridges covered with magnets and pop cans littered about trying to take attention from grandma!
ReplyDeleteI tried making changes in Photoshop Elements, but didn't come up with anything better than what you have already done. What I can do is suggest what to do before taking the picture.
First, remove what can be removed. (pop cans) Then open up your aperture so that the photo will naturally be blurry. It's really hard to make a natural looking blur after the fact. Doing this in the camera will automatically make grandma the focus.
Also, I think there must have been something yellow or green on the wall because there is a definite color cast on grandma's face. A hue adjustment layer with the yellow channel selected could help fix this.
Finally, backing up a bit would have gotten more of grandma's arm in the picture. The way it is now, the arm seems a bit disjointed. Getting the arm all the way down to the table would give the photo some context to grandma's positioning.
Agh! Did I overwhelm you? Obviously, this is a lot to think about before taking a picture, and sometimes you just have to capture the moment and not worry about all the details. I'm glad you did capture it. It totally brings back memories of my grandmas who have both passed away. Enjoy this time with your grandma while you can!
I agree that the main problem for this photo would be the distracting background...this is a difficult issue though when you are just taking fun snapshots to remember a moment and aren't posing the subject for the shot.
ReplyDeleteFor this shot, I would have definitely zoomed in a LOT closer to her face to help get rid of a lot of the distracting elements in the shot before I even took the photo. By zooming in the lens will naturally blur some of the background for you too (which is awesome!)
To me, your edited photo still seems to be quite dark. I took it into Camera RAW in PS (which I believe you can also do in PSE) and was able to brighten it quite a bit just by adjusting the fill light and exposure layers. It would be fairly simple to edit this photo after doing those first two steps.
This really is a wonderful photo of your grandma! I wish I had more shots like this to remember my grandma by. :)
~Angie
co-founder of iHeartFaces
just had to say hi. your grandmother is beautiful. i lost mine when she was 87, and she was just as beautiful as she was when she was 60, probably more so! what a wonderful memory you've captured here! wish you both many more to come!
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