kids in Malaysia

[Ishmael.]

Here's some shots I took in Malaysia. The first one was a nightmare to post-process....such high contrast, I'm not really sure how to even it out well. Any/all criticism welcome!

Thanks

Ish

[RSL]

Ish, First thing is to get the color saturation back under control. Bring the thing up in Camera Raw and crank down the Saturation. Then use the Recovery slider to bring the highlights under control. Even when you've done that, the featureless fabric at the upper left is going to appear blown out though it's not. Finally, take the middle gray dropper and click the blue part of the fabric. I'm assuming the fabric's white, not blue. Finally you end up with something like this -- something that doesn't look like a Marlboro ad.

[attachment=16478:gunkids2.jpg]

[Jim Pascoe]

Hi Ish

The picture of the child is great, though personally I would have liked to keep the lips within the frame and not crop through them.  The first picture with the gun does not really have much going for it on a technical level, but the message is a powerful one.  It is the sort of picture that is fairly meaningless without context, but within a series of images it would be great.  If it was to be part of a photo-story, I would just crop out the distracting burned out area, as it is not needed.  Another possibility is to convert to monochrome as I have experimented with here.  However if it is part of a story, perhaps it would be better to keep the colour.  The colour of the bag does shout out 'child' after all.  Not sure if I quite like Russ's colour interpretation.  I think the dress has a lot of blue in it and that the worked-on version is too warm.  But hey, lucky we all have our own ideas!
[attachment=16490:gunkids2.jpg]


Jim

[Ishmael.]

hey thank you for all the help guys. I agree that the context  would add a lot to these photos....fortunately, there is one. I have about 4-5 other photos to go along with this one and I'll post them as soon as I get a chance.

Hi Ish

The picture of the child is great, though personally I would have liked to keep the lips within the frame and not crop through them.  The first picture with the gun does not really have much going for it on a technical level, but the message is a powerful one.  It is the sort of picture that is fairly meaningless without context, but within a series of images it would be great.  If it was to be part of a photo-story, I would just crop out the distracting burned out area, as it is not needed.  Another possibility is to convert to monochrome as I have experimented with here.  However if it is part of a story, perhaps it would be better to keep the colour.  The colour of the bag does shout out 'child' after all.  Not sure if I quite like Russ's colour interpretation.  I think the dress has a lot of blue in it and that the worked-on version is too warm.  But hey, lucky we all have our own ideas!
[attachment=16490:gunkids2.jpg]


Jim

[RSL]

Jim, You're right. My revision is too warm because I sucked extra blue out of the dress after balancing the thing with the middle gray dropper, but I'd be willing to bet that it's pretty close to the original scene -- which, of course, it doesn't have to be in order to be effective. But the revision also brought the wide dynamic range within bounds -- which, I think, was what Ish was after.

[Ray]

Jim, You're right. My revision is too warm because I sucked extra blue out of the dress after balancing the thing with the middle gray dropper, but I'd be willing to bet that it's pretty close to the original scene -- which, of course, it doesn't have to be in order to be effective. But the revision also brought the wide dynamic range within bounds -- which, I think, was what Ish was after.

Russ,
I got the impression the over saturation might be due to an inappropriate profile. The embedded color space is Adobe RGB. To get the following result, I assigned the sRGB profile to the image, which reduced the saturation slightly, then selected the 'gray-balancing' eyedropper in 'levels' and clicked on the gun barrel which is almost certainly grey.

Clicking on different parts of the gun produces a slightly different result, but one can assume that some reflected blue light from the backpack will affect the true grey of the gun in some parts.

[attachment=16508:gunkids2.jpg]

[RSL]

Ray, Yeah. I think you're right. That conversion looks the most convincing of all.