Here are my versions. Nothing too fancy. It was already pretty good to start with. I started by running it through Neatimage to reduce some of the background noise. Then I cropped it a little tighter to focus on the face while still keeping a little bit of the lion's body and the background for more interest. I also adjusted the levels and applied some burning to darken a few areas. Then I sharpened the lion while leaving the background alone. Great excercise.
Here's my take josh - I prolly would have square cropped it, but tried something different since a lot of others did that.
I shifted the yellow hues a bit (toward red), upped the saturation a bit, upped the contrast a bit, minor crop, added a border, unsharp mask (1, .3, 260), resize with 'save for web', unsharp mask again (1, .3, 200), save.
Edit: Tim was right, by the way, it's really good to begin with
here is my version after seeing the results here. i didn't think i would like the b&w take on it at first, but i decided on it, gives a more raw aggressive feeling i think. i also think the consensus is the vertical crop of the head which i chose for my composition. here it is:
I just thought the overall composition was similar to what I had done a half-hour before I saw his; cropped in tight and square ond blurring or otherwise de-emphasizing the background to frame the face further.
With mine, I thought the transition to B+W and ultimately "fading" to almost black added a feeling of dimensionality to it, almost like the face was thrusting towards me emerging through a gray mist.
achiral, I do believe I like your PS work the best on this shot. Good job. I loaded it up in photoshop myself and I really cant improve on it much more than you did. Nice work
but i think in this i would remove the red in the eyes.
BW looks good though...
Originally posted by achiral:
here is my version after seeing the results here. i didn't think i would like the b&w take on it at first, but i decided on it, gives a more raw aggressive feeling i think. i also think the consensus is the vertical crop of the head which i chose for my composition. here it is:
but i think in this i would remove the red in the eyes.
BW looks good though...
Originally posted by achiral:
here is my version after seeing the results here. i didn't think i would like the b&w take on it at first, but i decided on it, gives a more raw aggressive feeling i think. i also think the consensus is the vertical crop of the head which i chose for my composition. here it is:
soup
i would 99% of the time agree with you however i think it makes the photo a lot more intense and rabid. after i desaturated the eyes again it just didn't have as much pow
1) Fred Miranda's Chroma Noise Reducer
This takes out the coloured background noise without affecting any detail.
2) Fred Miranda's DV Pro setting 4
Shifts the color balance to get Fuji Velvia colors. = extra saturation
3) Apply Gaussian blur with a 3 pixel radius
4) History Brush the Lion back to the pre blur state with a 200px soft edged brush (=rough, smoother with a smaller brush, would also require more time) Effect is better bokeh, imho.
5) Image resized to 640x427
6) USM 300% on 0,3px 0 treshold (forgot to do this in lab mode)
7) Save for the web, close to 150kb.
Result is a natural looking image with better balance between everything and a good clean sharp punch.
