I went to Bangladesh in 2010 and took a lot of pictures I’m quite proud of - it’s a very photogenic place. I’m not very good at portraits, though. But I was in a train and spotted an amazing looking couple, and (with their permission) took a photograph of them. A straightened but otherwise unprocessed version of this photo is in the Flickr stream above.
I think they were father and daughter (though maybe husband and very young wife) from the minority Hindu community. They were both very handsome people, but very contrasting: he has an infinitely careworn face, lined with suffering. She is pure and beautiful and the lighting from the train window emphasizes this really well. Their expressions are ambiguous, but both of their sets of eyes seem to express stoicism and suffering.
I think it has the potential to be a fantastic shot.
Unfortunately I only got the chance to fire off one shot before the carriage got too crowded to take any more of them, and it’s riddled with problems of varying degree, the main ones being:
I had the camera on auto-ISO and it chose 800. Even the RAW version has a lot of grain on the right-hand-side of the man’s face.
The composition isn’t that great. There’s someone sitting in front of the girl, and his arm is obscuring her chest.
I’ve got Adobe Lightroom, but I don’t know how to use it. Generally I use Picasa but I think I need something a bit more powerful.
I would love it if someone who was a good photographer/post-production could make some suggestions on how to make this better, and/or advise me on how to improve the shot using Lightroom. I think their faces are incredible.
Full-sized JPG | PNG (converted from RW2 via Lightroom)
Thanks AT. That’s definitely really improved the girl’s face, but seems to have emphasized the noise in the shadow on his face.
I have heard Lightroom is really good for smoothing noise, but have no idea how one would go about it. I have Photoshop CS3 too but I believe 5 is much better for smoothing.
What about cropping? I did try cropping just their faces, which was OK, but the picture was very wide and thin.
I’m not a professional. Not even much of an ameteur in photo fixing. I “creative crop” a lot to get items out of a picture. Or try “cloning” (select part of the girls shirt) and drop it onto the place where the guy’s arm is. (either as a semi transparent larger “spray”, or just paint back and forth with the paintbrush) As far as the man’s face being darkened, try selecting that area and “brighten” or change the “highlight” on it. I just have a simple inexpensive program called Adobe Photo Deluxe, but it has worked with everything I can “throw at it”.
Does your RAW file allow you to bring back some of the blown highlights? I’m guessing it’s either totally blown or you’ve already tried bringing in some of the exposure on the right side of the frame, judging by the way her skin tones have gone to Simpsons yellow. For me, it’s those highlights that are most distracting. My eye darts straight to the white form (the man’s leg, I assume) on the bottom of the frame, then up his shirt, then to the woman’s face (or in the reverse order–it doesn’t matter as my eye gets caught by a part of the frame that’s not essential.) Argent Towers’s edit is the direction I would head in, but would need RAW sensor data that (hopefully) still contains some info in the highlights to bring it back to detail.
My attempt. I obviously cropped and rotated it a bit there.
I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. Grain is a pain to minimize. I blurred each color channel separately depending on how bad each one was. You can get away with blurring the blue channel quite a bit, because human eyes suck at blue.
I added a couple Levels adjustment layers and masked off some portions of the faces, then I boosted saturation just a bit.
I definitely think cropping is the way to go, I would move the eyeline either up or down so it is not right in the middle of the frame. I would also consider actually making it black and white.
This is definitely not finished; I’ve run out of time for the moment, but this is the direction I’d head in.
Cropping is a good start, but I wouldn’t go so far as to try to crop it down to focus entirely on the two faces in the center. While they’re clearly the subject and focus, there’s too many other interesting things going on to lose… the beautiful lines of the windows leading us to the background, the great framing element of the two men on either side of them, etc.
I did smooth a bit, but the grain actually doesn’t bother me… hell, if I kept going with it, I might even pull the grain UP… to me, it works for the shot.
Oh, and as far as the man’s arm blocking the woman… that’s not bad composition, that’s commentary: while the pretty woman is looking right at us, he stands between us, protecting her, a comment on their culture.
The man’s knee and the other man’s arm could be removed using several tools, mostly cloning. It would be quite time consuming and tricky. Enable many undo levels and save your intermediate work frequently in case you back yourself into a corner.
You might practice on a monochrome copy first, just to get the hang of it. Color is more demanding.
I’ve done retouching like this, but you gotta have patience. Skill helps, but patience is more important!
Oh, and I also purposely did NOT straighten the photo so that the horizontal line of the seat back is perfectly level… I actually like that it’s off-kilter; I think it adds to the photo. it helps to make it feel like we’re on a moving train.
If I could clone something out, I’d lose the man’s leg in the center because it’s a bit distracting, but I wouldn’t get rid of the arm of the guy on the right even if I could. I really do like how he frames the photo. Maybe move it down a touch, but I wouldn’t lose him.
Yeah, this is where I would probably go. I don’t think this photo needs agressive cropping. I like the context, and I like the man on the left of the frame. I don’t like little bit of forearm and the red shirt of the guy next to him, but what can you do. I would try to improve this photo with just old-school straight-up dodging and burning, something in this vein. The blown highlights still bug the crap out of me, and I’d like to hope that the RAW file contains some detail there, because that big white pant leg is just too much, and if you can tone it down about 1 1/3 - 2 stops, you might be in business.
(Note: Chrome renders this photo darker than Safari and Firefox for some reason. I saved it as an sRGB, and I thought Chrome honored color profiles, but perhaps I was mistaken. Anyhow, you get the quick-and-dirty idea. Were I doing this “for real,” I would more carefully fix the tones. I still think the woman’s face needs a tad bit of mid-tone contrast, the standing guy on the left can be toned better, and the sitting gentleman in the center could probably use a touch less contrast.)
I really like what you did, although my personal preference is to remove the guy on the left because it takes the emphasis from the couple. I wouldn’t try to take out his entire body, but I would crop to the right of the face.
Yeah, the left does need to be cropped in a little bit more. That very, very left part is annoying and does look better cropped out. But I kind of like the inclusion of the third guy as part of the gallery of expressions, gives it a bit more context, and I don’t think that third face really dulls the impact. You could always tone him down a bit if you feel he is distracting. I normally like really tight shots, but this one I like a bit looser. The lines also work a bit better with the looser crop. If anything, I’d crop it more like this, but I’m debating with myself whether the awkward body crop is distracting or not. And then this would be the tighter crop.
This is tough. I think the tightest one is certainly the safe, effective crop. Plus it’s in a more usual aspect ratio. But I kinda want to include a little more context for some reason. I’m not sure that I’m completely sold on my looser crop, though. This is one of those images I need to walk away from because I’ve been staring at it too long and trying to force it into how I want to see it, even though it’s probably not quite working because of the awkwardness on the left of the frame.
i do think I like the first crop here (not your original crop) moving the boy more to the right does make it look more like a frame, which I like, removing the empty space distraction to the right of his body
Thanks everyone! I really appreciate the effort you’ve put into this.
I do like the vignette approach Anamorphic, but pulykamell’s #2crop is the one that had the most striking effect on me, even though I’m dreadfully familiar with the picture already. That’s definitely the direction I want to go in.
I was shooting in RAW but Panasonic has a proprietary format, RW2, that can’t be read by everything. I read elsewhere that a DNG will maintain the RAW information when converted from RW2, but I mistakenly wrote PNG in my link. :smack: Here’s the DNG file (10Mb).
I assume you want total honesty, so I’ll give it to you: I don’t think your photo can be salvaged into anything beyond ‘ok’. The composition (in my opinion) is broken and cannot be fixed.
I understand how hard this is to come to terms with sometimes; I’ve been there. I have an image of a yellow house on a hill in Nova Scotia that could have been killer if I had shot it right, but it has problems that cannot be overcome in post-processing. I damn near want to hop on a plane to go have another crack at it.
It’s really a shame, because they are a super interesting pair (the guy, in particular).
