Cinco de Mayo

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone. For the occasion, I figure I'll finally release this image I've been working on (I took it almost exactly one year ago).

Comments welcome.

GB


Attachment 92935

Really nice. Love the glossy green pepper and he glossy red lips. Crop might be too tight, but I am sure you tried different ones.

nice light and composition, love the look in her eyes

the skin in her hand looks desaturated ?

Very inviting photo Greg! I think you've captured her very well, and the crop works fine for me. However, I think I like the red pepper version better. But I'd love to be the maker of either image!

Thanks fellows, glad you generally like it. As stated earlier, I shot this a freakin' year ago (!) and just recently got around to seeing what I had and editing it.. the original is actually waist up but I didn't care for the way it looked, so cropped in.

There was actually a few elaborate tricks I needed to do to get it to work ... I will post something on that in the post-processing forum soon. I think I must have put 10-15 hours in the processing of this one. A more experienced processor probably could have done it in 2.

Armando, Ken, here's the more-refined version. It fixes the color delta between her hand and face (that was unintended ), and also adds a small fingernail to her thumb, red to the pepper, lightens her hair for more definition, and to show Lava what it looks a little bigger, provides a less-cropped view.

Again - thanks for the comments.. Sometimes you need to see some sort of payoff for all the hrs you put into this.

G

(Click to see 1000 px image)
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1 year of additional experience doing PP is certainly noticeable

nice work

Did you not want the green stem? I like the less cropped, too. Nice job!!

Thanks Armando. The fact that I'm definitely improving my technique and learning new things helps justify all the time I put in!

Big Earn - great catch on the stem! I just fixed it in my master version :)

G

I'm not comfortable with portraiture photography yet so take this with a grain of salt Greg, the two things that bother me with this are 1 the loose stitching in the hat brim, and 2 I feel she is looking too much to her left exposing a bit more of the whites of her eyes than she should, had there been just the slightest bit of white to the other side of the pupil, i think the eyes would have looked better. Possibly clean up a few of the fly away hairs, other than that very nice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hminx

I'm not comfortable with portraiture photography yet so take this with a grain of salt Greg, the two things that bother me with this are 1 the loose stitching in the hat brim, and 2 I feel she is looking too much to her left exposing a bit more of the whites of her eyes than she should, had there been just the slightest bit of white to the other side of the pupil, i think the eyes would have looked better. Possibly clean up a few of the fly away hairs, other than that very nice.

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Thanks Pete, appreciate your respond and insight. The eyes are the one thing about this shot that isn't good. Since I can't really do anything about her looking over there, I slightly dulled the white ("sclera") in that eye, and made the other's brighter to even things out. I also cleaned up the stitching a bit (I had noticed that, but was unsure whether it added or subjected from the shot). Better? Since this is a new version, I also added a vignette and new crop for fun.

G


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