Giving pictures life

[Wineman]

I have just had some pictures printed and they have all come out rather flat. Of course I know about monitor calibration etc and this is somehting I have to look at.

Apart from that though - what do you do to give your pictures "life" and to lift them in PS?

Any hints really appreciated!

[Earl53]

I'd like to know this also. I like my photos but to me they seem to lack the jumping off the page look.:doh:

[Stemmy]

Post a sample and we can then tell you what we did.

[BarryM]

I use a couple of programs along with cs that i ithink are terrific.

Colour mechanic, you can chose a colour and increase the hue of the colour so red roses can have the red boosted slightly, hay field you can increase the orangeness of field, i think it makes a huge difference, and use it with most if not all my images. Another program i use is focus magic, there is an option for oof and it checks image and suggests the sharpness amount to adjust, but i tend to go no higher than 2, and find it really adds to the image, i also get all my images done in Matt, not sure why but i like the non gloss look.

[Wineman]

Here you go - they look fine on my screen but could you with more life. I have played with Curves and white/black points etc but they just look un-natural.

Good luck!

[AlanJM]

Not going to stand out a great amount, all I used was Shadow/Highlight and then Hue/Saturation

[Wineman]

Thanks Alan

This is is the same sort of thing I was getting - didn't look too natural to me though so didn't use it. Perhaps it is my eyes though!

[BarryM]

excellent shots and reworks, my cs is tooo slow to play but what i think i might do is

No1, blur the background slightly more, by selecting arouond the bridesmaids and inversing it, there is also something destracting on middle brides hair on left hand side of her bun thing so would clone that out.

No2, i would go with a tighter crop oon this perhaps just their heads and a torsos with some of the bouquet showing but not carraige sides.

No3 i had a bit of a play and thiink you could also crop this tighter to put more emphasis on the three of them,

and all the above with the editing that Alan has done.

[Wineman]

Thanks Barry -I will give it a go although I am slightly confined to their print size of 9x6 when cropping.

I got myself a Wacom yesterday so doing the work on No 1 will be an oportune moment to try it out!

[BarryM]

yeah i see what u mean just tried those crops on the image and its causing problems, that is an unusual picture size to use, dont think ive heard of that size being used, although probably as common as ell lol.

[Stemmy]

This is where I was with the last one

[BarryM]

That looks very nice indeed, ok just noticed something on the last shot and subsequent edits, there is a large circle showing on the guys jacket, about 2 buttons up and to the left

[bobp]

Hi, I always use fill flash.
Both these have fill flash @ +5.
Then play around with brightness and contrast.
The girls have b/con at +20 each.
The couple have +10 on brightness and +12 on contrast.
What do you think?

[Stemmy]

yes I noticed that Barry I assumed it was raining thats why they look like they are taking shelter somewhere

You do need to look to your printers if you are unhappy with the quality of your prints. They should be able to help you. If they use the right paper and the right chemicals (and change them regularly) then there shouldn't be a problem.

Obviously none of your prints are going to look exactly like they do on screen as one is light and the other is a print.

[lostmysnorkel]

Hi Barry,

I use 9x6 quite a lot as my camera (D70s) shoots a 3:2 aspect ratio.

The 'natural' print sizes would therefore be 6x4, 9x6, 12x8, 15x10.

It is much easier when a client selects these sizes, although I offer all the usuals - 7x5, 10x8 etc - it just means a photoshop crop before sending to the printer.

What do you shoot with and what's it's aspect ratio?

[Wineman]

Stemmy and Bobp - very nice indeed. Thank you very much I will experiment tomorrow. Any of you near Kent and want to give me a private lesson?

Stemmy - what did you do to achieve the desired result?

It was teaming with rain from the church onwards. Worst case senario situation and I just had to work in really bad light in the rain whilst they stood under a roof canaopy! The spot is a dot of rain which is a real pain which I will edit out before the final print..

I have a lovely venue for Friday and the forecast is good so am looking forward to that one!

I have just noticed that people are now copying my Avatar created for me by Stemmy.... Very good!

[StagePhotography.co.uk]

Ok how do these look.?.?.?.?

quick edit job... wasn't too tidy... :)

[David Worthington]

This is my quick attempt at one of them. levels saturation and a bit on contrast....... selected the girls and darkened the B/G ..... about 1 minutes work.

what ya think

[David Worthington]

opps it didn load !!!

[David Worthington]

there dont seem to be much wrong with the capture... and it seems to me to be just routine P/S work to get them somewhere right..... only about 1 minute spent on each of my attempts here.

[tibet]

I had a go at 2 of them.

[tibet]

BTW, My prints always look exactly like they do on my screen! Monitor calibration should be a priority when you shoot digital and edit your images in a digital darkroom. You will never get an accurate result if you don't start with monitor calibration.

[Swen]

Hi Tibet and anyone,

Where can I go to get the details on monitor calibration. Seems to me that I tried it and it didn't do anything. Maybe I just didn't do it correctly. I have a Neovo 19 LCD and WinXP.

Thanks,

Swen

[Keitht]

If all you did for calibration was use Adobe Gamma you will have problems with colour match. I use SpyderPro2 which gives a much closer match when used in conjunction with printer profile.

[BarryM]

Just to throw a cat amongst the pigeons, ive never calibrated my monitor, its a lcd laptop screen, and never had issues with prints, well i did use adobe gamma a couple of years ago, but not since and no problems.

[Wineman]

Thanks for all these guys - very much appreciated. Now how did you do them????

My monitor shows a good resemblance to the prints from my commercial printer. After a while to get to know what what the final output is likely to be. Being a Mac it seems harder as well!

[Renee Marquis]

Question: How do you calibrate your monitor? I just wing it... but know I have to fig this step out.....but boo woo just computer dumb....

[Kirsty]

A lovely set of images to play with, love the bouquet.

Here my attempt:
#1- altered the brightness and contrast
#2- cropped it on the right slightly, adjusted contrast & saturation.
#3- again upped the contrast a little, and cropped on the left.

Hope you like, i didnt want to alter them too much form the original photos because they were great shots to begin with

[pjcaver]

I agree with almost everything everyone else has said about the images in terms of making them pop out. Playing with the contrast and saturation, then applying some selective focus will draw the attention to the appropriate areas of the image. One thing that I don't think anyone mentioned is playing with the brightness of portions of the image. Bright objects attract the eye, darker objects generally don't. With the three bridesmaids in bright white dresses, it's hard not to have your eye drawn directly to that portion of the image. Admittedly it is not exactly the same as making the images "pop out" at you, but you'll find that your eye is drawn away from the center of attention by bright areas. Ansel Adams intentionally darkened the fringes of his images or specific portions thereof to draw the eye right to what he wanted you to see.

About a month ago, I was asked to jury a cave photography competition. Having been a cave photog for 37 years, I still learned a tremendous amount about what made a great image really great just by looking at the various entries. There were certainly a lot of very bad entries and it was easy to assess why they were so bad (focus, lighting, lack of composition) but it was also much easier to see and define what made the good images so good. The brightness of the image and whether there were distractions by having multiple bright areas in the same image was a great learning experience for me.

I really liked the selective coloring that someone did in response to the original question of what to do.

pjcaver