Edited
Critique Style Requested: In-depth
The photographer has shared comprehensive information about their intent and creative vision for this image. Please examine the details and offer feedback on how they can most effectively realize their vision.
Self Critique
I was pleased with the rim light and all my shots are sharp and timely. I am struggling with editing it to make it pop more. It just seems so blah in color pallet and of course the surroundings (nothing I can do about that).
Creative direction
The image so far seems to be too drab to suit me. What can I do to help this image (and will help me edit all the others that I took during the actual proposal)?
Specific Feedback
I’m hoping some of you that are good at editing (LR please, I am not good with PS), to give some advice to help make this image worthy of the occasion.
Technical Details
Canon R5, Canon 70-200 mm L lens, f8, 1/500 ISO 400 HH shot through a window.
Description
My neighbor asked me to shoot some pictures of him asking his girlfriend to marry him yesterday. I was to shoot through the window so they had their time alone for the special moment. Afterwards I was called outside and I was able to use my flash to help with the lighting.
We used the field for our BG because we didn’t want buildings to be in the images. It was at 5:00 pm so the sun was up enough but starting to get fairly low so the light wound up being a nice rim light on them, but of course, they were shaded on the side facing me.
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Hi Shirley,
What strikes me is that the couple are so dark. Your rim light is beautiful, but if you could have used a reflector it would have been good to light the couple. In that vein, I did the following (in ACR - I don’t use LR, but ACR has all the same controls):
Radial mask to increase exposure on couple.
Invert that mask to darken the area around them.
Brush mask on the couple (you could probably use the Choose People option in LR to better effect - my masks are a bit sloppy) to lighten even more.
Increase darks using the parametric curve on the whole image.
Then a slight S curve using the point curve to pop the contrast and color a tad (maybe could have done this all with the parametric curve, though).
All those adjustments on the jpg file introduced some weird artifacts I think, but you get the idea.
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For through a window and backlit you did a great job!
First I did some global tonal adjustments:
Then I did Select Subject – it gives a hard-edged selection that you may want to soften slightly but I left it as it was and did these adjustments:
Then I selected BG and just slightly softened the bright grass color to bring more emphasis on the couple.
Some further tweaking of contrast with the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks with an eye on the histogram will go a long way, with and without the selections. And the curves is also powerful and well worth comparing.
Best wishes to the happy couple! (And the photographer!)
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@Bonnie_Lampley and @Diane_Miller both gave you better approaches than I’d have come up with Shirley, so I won’t try to reprocess this. It is too bad you were constrained by the window as the biggest thing to my mind that would have helped would have been to get a bit lower, though thinking about it, that probably would have brought the horizon and distant junk in to confuse the background. Getting them nice and sharp with that cool rim light is the important part as Bonnie and Diane have both done excellent jobs of demonstrating what processing can do.
Thank you @Bonnie_Lampley @Diane_Miller for your helpful suggestions. I tweaked the image some and reposted.
The reason I was having to work through a window and not even use a reflector was to let it be an element of surprise for the bride to be. She was totally surprised. The cost though was not the best lighting situation for the actual proposal moment. I was called outside after they had their moment, and they posed and I used fill flash. So we have some good shots, but these of the actual proposal mean a lot to them and I want to present the best I can to them even though the lighting wasn’t ideal. Thanks so much for your help. Thank you @Dennis_Plank for your comments as well. You guys are the greatest. This is what NPN is all about!
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