ok. I took a bunch of portraits of my friends family and I noticed that in a lot of them that they got this wicked sun glare off of their faces and hair. Is there anyway I could prevent this from happening in the future? I know that the best thing would have been to get them out of the sun completely but it was impossible in some of the shots. And I'm pretty sure you can't but is there anyway in Photoshop to help these. I tried using the burn tool and it doesn't do much but make it greyed out...
Have a look here: //photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/index2.html for how to use a flash to provide fill flash, that would have solved your problem. There isn't a great deal you can do to rescue those shots in Photoshop, you can improve them slightly with a technique that uses blending layers, explained here: //www.outdooreyes.com/photo74.php3
See the results using the technique on your shots, a little improvment I think:
Well, ya, you could go re-shoot with a fill flash..OR you could realize that these are great family portraits which are VERY hard to get and that they won't care about some glare here and there. They all look happy and relaxed. That's a rarity my friend! These photos are very non-walmart so they get two thumbs up from me.
I thought I'd show you some more while we were talking about them. I was happy to hear that someone thought they were good. I am always my worst critic...
No I didn't.. They're not as blurry before I shrunk them. These were just shrunk down so I could ad them to the site to get them printed. I do have a tripod but the thing is crap. I really need to get a better one.
Originally posted by mk:
I really like the poses/setups here and the people seem very comfortable. Some of them seem slightly blurry or out of focus, did you use a tripod?
Many people don't carry reflectors or flasguns when out walking and taking group shots like these - but there will probably be some newspaper in the car which acts as an impromptu reflector - you do need a helper here though.
i really like the middle one, and i think i would like these better if you cropped some off of 1,2, and 4 even if they are a little out of focus you could at least see their faces a bit better...just a suggestion
This may sound stupid but how does a flash make the bright part of their face or hair or whatever be less bright? These are so bright I lost all detail...
Originally posted by ianmill:
Many people don't carry reflectors or flasguns when out walking and taking group shots like these - but there will probably be some newspaper in the car which acts as an impromptu reflector - you do need a helper here though.
Not sure if anyone mentioned this yet but you should try to get them into the shade to take the pics. Shoot at a different time of day perhaps, or just use some big trees to make sure they arent in the sun at all.
Then yes a fill flash is also very important. It will light up their faces and add a catchlight in their eyes.
Making sure you have a fast enough shutter speed also helps with the softness some mentioned.
A larger aperture might help to get the background out of focus a bit. Right now in many shots the background is competing with your subjects.
You guys rock! lol No, seriously. Thanks for all the help everyone. I'm going to get good (better) at this yet...
Originally posted by TerryGee:
Not sure if anyone mentioned this yet but you should try to get them into the shade to take the pics. Shoot at a different time of day perhaps, or just use some big trees to make sure they arent in the sun at all.
Then yes a fill flash is also very important. It will light up their faces and add a catchlight in their eyes.
Making sure you have a fast enough shutter speed also helps with the softness some mentioned.
A larger aperture might help to get the background out of focus a bit. Right now in many shots the background is competing with your subjects.
Getting in closer and using fill flash is the answer. Fill flashes brightens the shadow areas helping to balance out the dark and light areas. Your camera can then meter this correctly resulting in more highlight and shadow detail. The new Shadow/Highlight feature in Photoshop CS is great for helping improve photos like yours. There are also other filters or actions available on the internet that help fix these problems. It's never quite as good as getting it right in the first place particularily with the blown out highlights but they can help. I have a Photoshop action that I would be happy to email to you that can help. Another tip is to try to be real careful not to over expose the highlights even if the resulting picture looks slight underexposed because it is much easier to pull detail back out of the shadow areas. Another thing you might want to do is take two or three shots with different exposures (exposure bracketing) and either pick the best one later or combine the best exposures of each photo into one photo.
