Hi, everybody this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique, today’s image was submitted by James who is an intermediate photographer we’re going to looking inside the Photoshop. The back story in this one is that James said he had birthday party for his sister-in law he cook most of the day, had a few minutes to come out with this Nikon D200 and pop up flash. Take a few grab shots this is one of them, he says he shot his with a 7200 f28 zoom at 200mm. So with the crop factor for this, comes a very long focal length plus the 300mm. shot this at F35 with a 60th of a second in raw and took the raw file, processes that took into the light room and finish processing.

One of the things that I like right away about this image is the fact if not as background is pretty close and there’s a lot of going on back there. There’s some nice separation because of the long focal up here and wide-open amplitude creating a shallow depth of the field. Something else that I’m enjoying in the image is, even though James shot this with an effective focal length to 300mm. in and shutter speed wasn’t that fast a 60th of a second. If you were shooting him held here then the pop up flash to me is doing a couple things for him. The duration of flash is very short an average somewhere around 1,500th of a second. And if you do a pretty good job of him holding that pop of light that’s very short can essentially become a shutter speed or second shutter. And that duration of the light particularly this is was darker area of the room can help you handhold this little shutter speed.

The classic with this kind of focal length, you really need to be around a 500th of a lens or faster to handhold him to get a short picture it is just something to think about. Of handholding in flash the other thing that I will say about the pop up flash is the other thing I like about this shot is how much light James ahs poured into the eye here on the portrait subject. This gesture is really nice kind of a invent stop picture a lot of times those shots can start to look very much the same with people sort of looking right into the camera and mugging for the camera. And this seems a little bit more a like a stolen moment that’s a little bit more editorial and documentary where she’s maybe thinking about something there’s a really peaceful look in the eyes. The eyes are big part of this expression in getting the light in there is really helping. And I also like the fact that there’s some exciting color up here that can also help to keep my mind on the portrait subject even though there’s quite a bit going on in the background. I’m enjoying that part of it I like that dominant placement here like with the rectangular framing. Fitting the portrait subject a little bit out of the middle, and having a little bit more of a negative space on one side or the other than the portrait subject. Particularly with her looking on this direction, I think that works, I’m pretty well too.

When I think about the perfect world improvement for this image, I want to just show you something real quick, it’s a tool that I use all the time in Photoshop. It’s re-scaling and I use it to correct all kinds of things, I also use it to enhance. In this case I’m going to make this image bigger, we have an issue where the glasses a re essentially creating a distortion right here. And I just want o show you a quick way to correct this using re-scaling. I’m going to duplicate the layer on Mac apple j, control J and then I’m going to the polygonal also, and I’m going to make a rough selection here. I’m just going to come over here something like this. This is the real important part of the selection and I’m come up way out here in to the hair and I am going to do that. Because I want to take this selection right here again Apple J or control J to put that selection up on its own layer there it is. I’m going to re-scale that. I’m going to push it back in so that I can line this up with the rest of the face and if I just come around the glasses themselves. When I push in on the duplicated layer, the old layer of glasses wills all of the sudden pop out from behind there and I have to deal m with that. By making a bigger selection and creating this zone out in here where even when I re-scale the top end formation what’s underneath it that will be similar. It will be very easy to blend those 2 layers, so now, with this layer active I’m going to edit transform, scale and I’m going to take that layer and push it in until I can match up with the rest of the face below. And add a mask to this and then going to make black my foreground color push B to get the brush tool. And I’m going to go ahead and create a little bit of a harder brush that I so on painting on mask is typically just cleaning up the edge mask here around 40 %. And now I’m going to go to the 100% of opacity on the brush by hitting 0 on the keyboard and I’m going to make the brush a little bit smaller. And then I’ll just going to come in and I’m going to paint on the mask and clean up the edge a bit. And I got everything matching up there by just using a little bit of re-scaling in the shot. And we go on to a 100% and there are a few other things that we might do here to sort of make it perfect.

And there’s a little bit of duplication out in here that we could deal with. I vary usually very quick with that gives you the basic just of that correction. I also if I’m worried about the eye getting re-scale, I could’ve made this selection on the other side of the eye. And taken that in consideration but hopefully that gives you a tool that can help you do all the kinds of things. Now let’s go away from that picture and then let’s go over to a picture where I have. And see which one of this in here, there it is. Where I’ve made a lot more changes to the image, we’re going back out of all of those changes. And I’ll walk you through them. Once I got to this corrected distortion version, one of the things I like to do is make here come forward a little bit more in the image. And one of the new cool things in Photoshop in addition to this drawer for your adjustment layers. In the fact that they pop up in this area and don’t get in your way, if we got hue saturation in some of the other adjustment layers have this too. There are some really cool presets that could speed our work flow.

And I just used the preset here called all stall, which is a de-saturation make s this thing look like we shot it on NPs in negative film. Or one of the all Kodak negative films this sort of under saturated. And I did that to create that feeling right there and I did that on this layer and then you can see my mask here I just apply the change to the background. And you can see how we can use color just like we use floral focus or just like we’re using lighting we can use flow of color to make one idea come forward more than the other. The next thing that I did was mi came in and I had a more local contrast to the hair. I’m trying to create contrast there so that the hair becomes a framing and its visual stop that keeps all of that contrast and the foliage and everything that is on the wall. From being the next thing that you get to, I’m trying to frame the main subject the face in the way slows you down visually. The next thing that I did was just a little bit of overall darkening, particularly in those areas in the back ground that are more flush tones that they don’t harmonized quite so much with the face and pull you back there. The next thing that I did was add al little bit more saturation to the lips and eyes to bring that forward. I did a little bit of lighting there on the teeth, maybe a little bit too much let’s turn that dull a little bit. And the last thing that I did was add an even little bit more low end in to the hair all these things just designed to make the portrait subject come forward. And there’s where we started and without that the re-scaling and there’s where we ended up. And one of the things that I want to say here at the end is this is essentially event photography even it’s a private party. Very difficult, one of the hardest gigs in photography because you just don’t have much control and I think that James has done a really great job here of charactering and expression that seems authentic. Creating a separation to begin within a difficult situation, which she’s close to a pretty busy background getting a really a nice slide to the eyes.

And we to thank James for submitting this image to the mindful eyes daily critique.