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I was walking along George St in the city (Sydney) around lunchtime when I saw these two ladies wearing brightly coloured summer dresses waiting at the intersection to cross amidst a sea of drab whites, blacks and greys (mostly people wearing business clothes). As we were crossing I got a lovely flick of the hair and here we are.

I used the local adjustment brush in Adobe Lightroom to post process the image as you see it here - I firstly used a large hard brush over the whole image to reduced the Saturation, Clarity and Sharpness all to -100 and I then used the Erase brush with Auto Mask to "paint" the two women back in and then touched up the edges a little.



NIKON D90 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 1/160 sec at f / 5.6, ISO 200

As always feedback most welcome.

I really like this shot. Love the selectove colour although i think having both girls in colour reduces the impact personally. Id like to see it with just the flikcing hair girl in colour to give a very strong focal point.

Lovely.

I'm not usually a fan of selective colour, but here it works a treat.

Well done.

I like this as well Rodney. You are certainly giving the street thing a good go.
Still can't bring myself to try it.

colin_12 wrote:I like this as well Rodney. You are certainly giving the street thing a good go.
Still can't bring myself to try it.

Thanks - I still havn't worked up to stopping random people in the street and asking them if I can take their picture... when I want to try a staged portrait rather than totally candid...

I agree with the general comments. Not normally a fan of selective colour, I think it works well here, emphasised, in a way, by the slight angle.

I notice you tend to photograph pretty girls from behind?

Remorhaz wrote:I was walking along George St in the city (Sydney) around lunchtime when I saw these two ladies wearing brightly coloured summer dresses waiting at the intersection to cross amidst a sea of drab whites, blacks and greys (mostly people wearing business clothes)

So, why go the selective colour route?

What you've described sounds like it occurred naturally, so why not leave it at that? Or maybe a slight desat?

While I understand what you were trying to communicate IMHO I think it would be better if you kept it in colour. Without seeing the original it's hard to make suggestions besides increasing the contrast or burning in the background.

gstark wrote:What you've described sounds like it occurred naturally, so why not leave it at that? Or maybe a slight desat?

PiroStitch wrote:While I understand what you were trying to communicate IMHO I think it would be better if you kept it in colour. Without seeing the original it's hard to make suggestions besides increasing the contrast or burning in the background.

The original... A slight desat might have worked - however since I was playing with this technique (might even be the first time) I took it to the max to see where it would go and I liked the results...

i dont like the colour version

Rooz wrote:i dont like the colour version

Nor do I - it's too busy and my ladies don't stand out enough - like I "felt" they did when I first saw them in the crowd on the street corner - thus my attempt to "rescue" the feeling I had when I first took the shot.

Rooz wrote:i dont like the colour version

The first one makes them really stand out

Although the first impression by the first version was good, that did not last because of the weird look of the background. Good idea though...