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I have just started taking up portrait photography after years of mainly shooting sports.Here are a few pics from a recent shoot....any critique is most welcome.

The background in #1 is a little distracting and the pose does not work for me (I guess it is a pretty standard pose), I like #2 much better but (it could be this laptop screen) her skin looks a little over exposed.

Great effort though, keep them coming!

I like no 2 as well seem more relaxed and has warm feel to it, my screen shows the skin over exposed too.
I do not dislike no 1 it just seem to be lacking and also don't like the hair across the face.
I took some shots which had hair across the face didn't see it at the time so photoshop them out which takes time.
But still good shots through

I take the point about the skin tones maybe a bit overexposed in the second pic.Im still learning to use photoshop properly and i was trying the skin smoothing technique,but i guess i might have gone a bit too far.

Here is another shot from the same shoot

These all look a tad too yellow to me. She looks like she has jaundice. Check the yellows of her eyes (formerly known as "the whites") and her teeth are somewhat reminiscent of an aging pianola. Is there such a thing as a pianola that is not aging? What were your in-camera wb settings, please?

In the first image, the pose looks forced and uncomfortable: it looks as if she is leaning backwards for the photo, and almost falling out of it.

Your lighting in these images is nice and soft and diffuse. Were you just using the open shade, or did you use some modifiers?

I'm with Gary, the first thing I noticed was the WB, and it reduced the attraction of the photos in a major way.

Just looking again at home, I have to agree, she does look a little yellow, and skin in #2 is still looking a little over exposed.

with Gary, the lighting is really nice, diffuse and soft.

I am no expert on skin tones but adding +27 on the blue slider in photoshop colourbalance made a world of difference.

surenj wrote:I am no expert on skin tones but adding +27 on the blue slider in photoshop colourbalance made a world of difference.

That might appear to address the problem, but if the issue is wb, then it might not be the best way to deal with this.

gstark wrote:

surenj wrote:I am no expert on skin tones but adding +27 on the blue slider in photoshop colourbalance made a world of difference.

That might appear to address the problem, but if the issue is wb, then it might not be the best way to deal with this.

Gary, Are you suggesting changing the WB on raw conversion? What is the difference between the two approaches?

surenj wrote:

gstark wrote:

surenj wrote:I am no expert on skin tones but adding +27 on the blue slider in photoshop colourbalance made a world of difference.

That might appear to address the problem, but if the issue is wb, then it might not be the best way to deal with this.

Gary, Are you suggesting changing the WB on raw conversion? What is the difference between the two approaches?

Yes I am. Certainly, if the raw is available, that would be the first avenue I would explore. You need to, really, address the problem, rather than the symptoms.

There's a couple of points to observe here. First of all, by adjusting the raw, you're addressing any problems at about the closest possible level to the source image. That means that everything that's derived from that is affected, which means that everything that's derived from it is also adjusted.

But in adjusting the blue, as you have done, you are only just adjusting the one colour channel. That will have a minor affect on some of the other colours in the image, where there is an element of blue/yellow in those other colours. But if there is not, then those colours may not be affected by your changes.

That might sound ok, until you understand that if the issue is one of wb, then we're actually talking about an issue in the way that the light illuminating the whole of the image has been recorded and rendered. If we're not correctly accounting for the light, then all of the colours will be likely to be so affected. In those circumstances, selectively correcting just some of the elements will actually distort the colour relationships within the image, and may make subsequent adjustments even more difficult.

So, and as always , it's a matter of getting back to basics and trying to identify what the actual problem is, and then correcting that. If the problem is merely wb, getting that fixed will bring everything else back into line, and make any other colour adjustments that much easier.

Thanks Gary, that makes sense..

When i was doing this shoot,i had the WB setting on the camera on the "shade" setting,but i also adjusted the WB a little in photoshop on the RAW image.A reason why the skin tones may be a little yellow;that first shot had a slight red cast over it so i adjusted the red in "colour balance" on photoshop,but i obviously shouldve adjusted the yellow also.

So, and as always , it's a matter of getting back to basics and trying to identify what the actual problem is, and then correcting that. If the problem is merely wb, getting that fixed will bring everything else back into line, and make any other colour adjustments that much easier.

Agree with this

Firstly is your monitor calibrated ?

I just played with the 3rd image in ps, I just used auto colour on a different layer & played with amount and then adjust curves.......hope you don't mind...



vince

This will be a difficult image to correctly colour balance and after a number of quick attempts I found that IMAGE/HUE-SATURATION-YELLOW CHANNEL and reduce the saturation of the yellow works reasonably well. The image could also do with a little curves adjustment to brighten the mid-tones. If it all gets too difficult then an elegant way out is to convert the image to black & white.

Not a bad first try into portraiture. I agree with what most people say regarding the white balance and posing issue.

Don't be too concerned. You did well. Everything is in focus and lighting is spot on. Just keep shooting, reviewing, researching and shoot again. You can only improve.