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Hi folks been a long time between posts for me. Like most of you life has been rather busy, thankfully a new job for me has meant picking up the camera and getting paid for doing it.
I came across a rather challenging shot on Saturday and would love some C&C on the result I ended up with.

The challenge was low lighting on the quartet and the highlight of the beautiful chandelier. I would have loved more detail in the chandelier and a little more detail on the quartet .



Would love to hear your comments on making this a better shot. Thanks.

Try this link http://www.heapsofphotos.com/p254956340/h28b41de7#h29136ed2

Mal
Thoughts that pop in to my head about the problem are;
HDR,
grad filter,
combination of filter and hdr.

That sort of a shot is most likely beyond my skill level so I may be totally off track with the suggestions.

I agree that HDR would be the answer to this shot, though you would need to use the anti-ghosting ability in CS5 to pull it off successfully even then. A grad ND would be an old school solution that would work with care, but I am just beginning to do HDRs and for photos like this it is ideal.

Thanks guys HDR was at the back of my mind when I was taking this. But does HDR work with a fair amount of movement? The violin players were getting into it, and swaying around a fair bit.

The movement would be a problem. There may be a section in the music where the players are relatively still.

And you could possible take one of the correctly exposed single exposures of the people and blend it in with the rest of the HDR.

Mal wrote:But does HDR work with a fair amount of movement? The violin players were getting into it, and swaying around a fair bit.

That is why I specifically mentioned the anti ghosting in CS5.
It allows you to specify the "Master" image to use. Objects are only included if they appear in the master image.
Movemnt issues are pretty well eliminated.
Murray took a HDR with a moving car in it. There were multiple ghosts of the car in the resultant HDR. Then he checked the "remove ghosts" box and all but one magically disappeared. I have since tried it with scenery on windy days & it improves the definition of foliage no end

Mr Darcy wrote:That is why I specifically mentioned the anti ghosting in CS5.
It allows you to specify the "Master" image to use. Objects are only included if they appear in the master image.
Movemnt issues are pretty well eliminated.
Murray took a HDR with a moving car in it. There were multiple ghosts of the car in the resultant HDR. Then he checked the "remove ghosts" box and all but one magically disappeared. I have since tried it with scenery on windy days & it improves the definition of foliage no end

If it is that good then it may just be worth the expense to upgrade to CS5. Do you have an example of the car photo?
I would love to see a before and after shot, mainly so I can convince the boss that it is worth upgrading to get better shops.

Pretty hard to comment on teh details of it since the image is pretty small, however a few things come to mind here. Have you PP'ed this image? have you sucked some light out of teh shadows yet? If not there is some potential in this shot to get more detail (assuming your in raw), however it will always be a compromise unless you go a HDR image.

If this was me, I would have bracketed the shot and worked on the idea of manually blending a few edited exposures.

Mal wrote:If it is that good then it may just be worth the expense to upgrade to CS5. Do you have an example of the car photo?
I would love to see a before and after shot, mainly so I can convince the boss that it is worth upgrading to get better shops.

That photo is Murray's, so no I don't have a before/after. I will have a look to see if I have something obvious.

biggerry wrote:Pretty hard to comment on teh details of it since the image is pretty small, however a few things come to mind here. Have you PP'ed this image? have you sucked some light out of teh shadows yet? If not there is some potential in this shot to get more detail (assuming your in raw), however it will always be a compromise unless you go a HDR image.

If this was me, I would have bracketed the shot and worked on the idea of manually blending a few edited exposures.

Yeah sorry about the size, using an iPad app and still getting used to posting pictures. Don't want to post a bigun here and get into trouble!!!!!
I did do some pp on it reduced the exposure to get some more details out of the lights. Did an auto tone to get some of the wall colour out as well. (using Lightroom)

My issue with this sort of job is that I need to grab photos that give a "feeling" for the night. Most folk who attend the conference are really only looking for pictures of themselves, however the event sponsors and the art director like to get photos of the things they spent the money on. Time is my biggest enemy. And as such I need to be moving around quickly and grabbing as many good photos as I can. I also need to have the pictures up the next morning as the delegates arrive so I have limited time for pp work.

However the reason for my initial post was that I can see some photo opportunities that I know are going to take a little more pp work and I'm happy to come back to them later to do it. So any thing I can keep in the back of my mind when grabbing a shot helps. So thanks for your ideas.

Mal wrote:However the reason for my initial post was that I can see some photo opportunities that I know are going to take a little more pp work and I'm happy to come back to them later to do it. So any thing I can keep in the back of my mind when grabbing a shot helps. So thanks for your ideas.

cool, if your keen post up the original unprocessed shot I would be keen to have a crack at it

biggerry wrote:
cool, if your keen post up the original unprocessed shot I would be keen to have a crack at it

Will have to drag it out from the backup files.... my system is a little too good sometimes
Due to the speed at which the client requires the photos I tend to have them all processed and backed up onto DVD's then cleaned of my machine within a week.

Mr Darcy wrote:

Mal wrote:If it is that good then it may just be worth the expense to upgrade to CS5. Do you have an example of the car photo?
I would love to see a before and after shot, mainly so I can convince the boss that it is worth upgrading to get better shops.

That photo is Murray's, so no I don't have a before/after. I will have a look to see if I have something obvious.

OK here is a three photo set processed as a HDR in Photoshop CS5. The Ghost removal toggle is set ON

[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/29374556@N06/5640374223/]Santiago Subway Station. Peakhour[/url

And the same three photo set processed without setting the remove ghosts toggle.

Santiago Subway Station. Peakhour. Ghosts

The original photos were hand held at f2.7 0.4 seconds, 1/60 and 1/120seconds respectively. ISO 1600. Taken with a Panasonic LX5

Have you considered using a reversing layer?

Duplicate Layer>invert>change "normal" to "overlay">reduce opacity.

Or just playing with curves might be the best option without going too far.

Hopefully I gave an easier alt. to HDR.

Mr Darcy wrote:OK here is a three photo set processed as a HDR in Photoshop CS5. The Ghost removal toggle is set ON

Thank you so much for finding an example of this. It is amazing that is can be so selective and get rid of that blur. It is certainly worth the upgrade to CS5 just for that feature alone.