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 p.15 #16 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony | |
AGeoJO wrote:
Lovely images! I fully understand your situation, dealing with artificial light for those images. The presence of blue blotches, the result of our color correction for the skin tone is unavoidable.
I captured this guy on the street of Cuzco on very recent trip. Although I managed to get a decent rendition of his skin tone but unless I applied some fancy masking work in PS, I could not get get rid of the blue blotches from artificial light sources. And I didn’t bother for this image here...
Your image are actually great but for my taste, they are simply too light and they look washed out, especially the first one. I am not sure whether you were shooting RAW or jpg but regardless, I do believe that your images will benefit greatly if you reduce the exposure. I hope you don’t mind my suggestion...
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The first image was captured during some street shooting in Cusco, Peru at night, well approximately at 10:00PM. Oddly, enough, the street was pretty much empty...I made a reference about shooting at night under artificial lighting conditions above.
The second one is of my grandnephew, James in Holland from 2 months ago when we were there...
Thank you for looking, everyone!...Show more →
Definitely you have a very good eye for color in my view. I didn’t mess up with photoshop, just a couple of quickly edits over my preset in LR. I don’t care at all about the blue in the highlights, and actually I use to leave the scene warmer at night, keeping more of the warm light from the street lamps, but in this case I asked for his opinion, and he preferred the more “neutralised” look, so actually I did the white balance in another batch of pictures just before in front of the church, and the temperature was 2400K. I showed him how around 2850K looked, but he preferred the colder (finally I left it at 2500 haha).
About the pictures of derKoekje, I perfectly understand the situation. Asian people in general really love overexposed pictures, and their skin to be really white, almost like ghosts. When I first came to live in Hong Kong, I was really scared seeing all the wedding photographers here going for that super bright washed out look, I was finding all the pictures really horrible. Little by little, it’s like my brain got used to it, and in some circumstances I kind of like it, and sometimes I as well don’t look that much at the histogram and just try to make people “pretty” and get nice bright pictures. And of course the easies way to deal with skin retouching is just blowing it out, haha. So it’s interesting how Asian people in general love appearing super white (because it’s a cultural thing, if you’re very white it means you belong to a wealthy family, and if you’re dark you might be working outside in the field), while for us Europeans (or us citizens, among others), if you’re too pale it might mean you’re everyday at the office, and if you look tanned you had some time for good holidays at the beach, etc. As for myself, I am a bit reddish, and I like my skintone in the pictures looking a bit more towards the yellow than towards red, and a bit lighter than it really is, and very important, with enough contrast so the darker parts still have enough saturation. I think one of the mistakes Sony users commonly make is trying to recover too much dynamic range, just because we have awesome sensor and ¨we can¨, and actually the pictures, to my eye, look better with a bit more contrast, not fearing to blow out highlights or having shadows with little details (and the skin looking more contrasty and not HDR), but of course it’s just my aesthetic opinion, that doesn’t usually match the “perfect photo” technically speaking, but for me, photography should lean more towards art than technic.
For example, look at this picture from the wedding of a couple of friends two months ago
 Sin título by Juanma Herrera, en Flickr
I don’t care about the blown out highlights, I just focused in the important part that is the people (and i preserved there what for me looks like a nice exposure and colors on them...)
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