ACDSee Pro

 Photography, How To, Tips, instruction

The bridal image as it was taken with no edits.

Wedding Photo With Chrismas ThemeIn my photography classes I always emphasize the value of using foreground and background objects to add depth to photographs. Unfortunately, in the real photography world, you have walls to deal, limited time to take photographs, and people who want us to take their photographs quickly.


Looking at this image you will quickly see how the foreground objects received too much light and were distorted in size by the wide angle lens. Always remember that when you use a wide angle lens objects in the foreground will appear larger than those in the background than with a normal lens

The result is a lot of foreground distracting your attention from the bride. In this lesson you will see the steps taken to turn this blah image into a good wedding portrait.

Before we move on look at the photo. How many things do you see that detract from the bride. Here is my list of composition and technical issues:

  • Too much foreground.
  • The window at the far left draws attention away from the bride.
  • The exposure looks off.
  • The bride is too centered in the image.
  • The poinsettia is blown out. (Overexposed)
  • The poinsettia looks huge.

 

Step 1. Fix the exposure issues.

 

Photoshop is my standard editing. If you are a Mac user please accept my apology for not knowing MAC keyboard commands.

For an initial pass at fixing exposure on an image that is overexposed try using ctrl-alt-~ This photoshop command selects the highlights in a image. You will see the selection ants around all the bright areas. Follow this command with a ctrl-J (New layer via copy)

Now you have a layer which only has the highlights of the image. Under the layers tab change the layer style to multiply.

You may need to adjust the opacity some until the image looks right.

Unfortunately, this did not fix it entirely for this image so I tried dragging the layer I created down to the new layer icon to see if it helped.

Now that the exposure has been tweaked and improved I was ready to work on composition.

 

Fixing the photographs composition.

To fix the photographs composition I decided to crop in tighter and move the bride more off center. As a result the annoying window on the left has been eliminated and some of the blown out flowers have been removed.

Unfortunately, the image is still not quite there so some more work will still need to be done.

The beauty of digital photography is that we can continue to tweak images until we have what we want. As a photographer you should never give in to the temptation of shooting without planning a forethought. If you do you will spend many hours trying to fix your photographs.

 

 

 

 

Using Photoshop to draw attention to your subject.

If you are new to photography you may not have ever seen vignettes in front of a camera lens. These vignettes were placed in front of a lens so that the edges of a photograph could be lightened or darkened to draw attention to the subject area.

With digital photography you can now create those later and with much better control over your final image. On this image you can see that I created a light window into the photograph which draws attention to the bride. In Photoshop here are the steps I use.

  1. Click on the fill or adjustment button on the layers pallet. I refer to it as the Ying/Yang button because the black/white design reminds me of these chinese figures.

Select Curves

Draw the right hand side down as shown below. The actual amount will vary depending upon your image.

Make sure that your foreground color is black. (on a PC press D and then X)

Select your paintbrush tool (Shortcut B) and adjust the size as needed. Be sure to have a soft feather edge to it.

Paint a lighter area on the image that draws attention to your subject. If you go too far press X to switch foreground/background and paint back in as needed. Adjust the layer's opacity as needed to finish the effect.

 

 

Photoshop Curves Window

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Increasing color Saturation

Once again a layer mask is used to adjust the image.

This time the saturation is used to give the flowers a deeper red. The image on the left will show you how the image looked when the adjustment was made. What I was watching was the flower in front of the bride. Once it looked good then the excess adjustment layer was erased. To do this select the brush tool and make sure your foreground is set to black. (Keyboard shortcut is D and then X.)

Using the brush tool erase the saturation except for the flower. If you erase too much of the photograph press the X key to switch the foreground/background colors and paint any of the adjustment layer that you erased by mistake.

 

 

 

 

 

The final Wedding Portrait

 

The final print looked much better than this scaled down web version.

Would it have been better had it been shot right to begin with? Yes, but as any wedding photographer knows you do not always have time to have light modifiers and reflectors there any minute you need them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you have been to one of my classes you have seen me use ACDSee in my classes. Check out this link for a way to save money on this great software.

Save 20% on ACDSee 8 Photo Manager! Buy Today and get a FREE upgrade to ACDSee 9 Photo Manager when it is released!

Submitted by Art Sprague of Art's Photography