Processing advice

[andy p]

New member here,. The foliage was intensely green and backlit. I turned down the saturation and tint a bit in lightroom, but I think it is still distracting. Any advice or other critique would be welcome.

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[JAS]

One person's questionable opinion. When I have a lighter subject, I will often use the LrC filters to select the background and darken it a bit to provide better separation. Others will also provide options.

 

[bleirer]

I think I would lower the exposure about one fourth of a stop, then try the point color tool to click on the green and lower the lightness and saturation. I find myself distracted by the big blob in the very top left corner. I think I would consider using the remove tool or the patch tool in content aware mode in photoshop to make that little corner green. I like the bokeh balls rising out of the head of the smaller animal like thought bubbles. The texture in the trees and fur is fantastic, I'd maybe slide the texture to the right just a touch to accentuate that without overdoing it.

 

[Patrick M]

I’d be inclined to try HDR or Active D lighting. But I don’t know enough. Just inking out loud, so to speak….

 

[andy p]

Thanks for all the comments. I will try some o fthe changes in post. Am I correct in understanding that to use HDR in a high dynamic range situation I have to select it in camera so the camera takes a series of exposures? Aren't you stuck with the raw data as shot otherwise? Still learning LR which may be a life long endeavor . 50 year old B&W darkroom skills only go so far.....

 

[bleirer]

Thanks for all the comments. I will try some o fthe changes in post. Am I correct in understanding that to use HDR in a high dynamic range situation I have to select it in camera so the camera takes a series of exposures? Aren't you stuck with the raw data as shot otherwise? Still learning LR which may be a life long endeavor . 50 year old B&W darkroom skills only go so far.....

I think you are right about the hdr. If you haven't explored them the lightroom masking tool are fantastic for selectively adjusting certain portions of the image.

 

[Calson]

When photographing people outdoors there is often a greenish hue with their skin with the reflected light off the foliage. Much easier today to shoot raw and make adjustments in an editor to reduce the green channel. My first step with a new image is to do a Levels adjustment and to set the white point.

 

[Bohdan]

In Light Room post processing, I would select the background decrease highlights and exposure and maybe even clarity sliders, play with them to determine if that's the look you like. then I would use Steves Lightroom Denoising method to seperate subject from the background and to deal with the noise . Then select subject and decrease highlights

 

[andy p]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

 

[RickW]

I agree about putting background on separate layer and reducing the exposure, but I think the entire image is overexposed. I would begin by selecting the lemur subjects, opening that selection on new layer, adjust the exposure and that layer, invert it and then bring down exposure on background. Work back and forth on subject layer and background layer until it looks good to you.

Btw - I also suggest working on the color of the critters. It looks off to me. They look too yellow or green or both.

 

[andy p]

Thanks for all the advice. I have worked on the saturation, tint and exposure using subject and background masking in LRC. I think it is closer. In reall life, the fur did seem to have some warm tones in the arms as best I recall - probablly some brown hairs there that are not on the head

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[RickW]

Thanks for all the advice. I have worked on the saturation, tint and exposure using subject and background masking in LRC. I think it is closer. In reall life, the fur did seem to have some warm tones in the arms as best I recall - probablly some brown hairs there that are not on the headView attachment 101531

Greatly improved. Understand that bottom of right leg has some brown/tan, but heads look much better. Hard not to love pics of lemurs. Perhaps consider getting rid of that large splash of bright in upper left. I’d probably leave the 4 or so bright spots to the right of the big one though in case processing them out would look to artificial. You could play with all of them, but the big one in upper left corner should go.

 

[Anjin San]

One person's questionable opinion. When I have a lighter subject, I will often use the LrC filters to select the background and darken it a bit to provide better separation. Others will also provide options.

What he said…