The photo I just can't get right

[mikehulsebus]

Alright, everyone's got that one photo they like but that's missing something. Here's mine. Its from quite some time ago with an old 3.2 megapixel camera. The origanal (which somehow vanished--amazing because I have O's of every single other photo i've shot) was horrifically backlit so i took out the little you could see behind the subject. All it was was a few car doors, and other stuff--parking lot was pure white. I'd be interested to see what you folks think I could do with one. I do wanna avoid black and white though--i like the blues in the coat and such too much to change it.

[Chunk]

Alright, everyone's got that one photo they like but that's missing something. Here's mine. Its from quite some time ago with an old 3.2 megapixel camera. The origanal (which somehow vanished--amazing because I have O's of every single other photo i've shot) was horrifically backlit so i took out the little you could see behind the subject. All it was was a few car doors, and other stuff--parking lot was pure white. I'd be interested to see what you folks think I could do with one. I do wanna avoid black and white though--i like the blues in the coat and such too much to change it.

This is a tough one. You are hampered by the low resolution. Here's a quick and dirty try with levels and curves correction and then a color correction to remove the blueish cast and warm the whole shot. There are a lot of artifacts surrounding the figure and hair that you can see if you change the background color(see the little pic). You might want to get rid of those (I did most of them in big pic) and then try to soften the edges (which I didn't do).
You would probably get a better answer than this over on the Digital Imaging forum.

[bobbythebandit]

Alright, everyone's got that one photo they like but that's missing something. Here's mine. Its from quite some time ago with an old 3.2 megapixel camera. The origanal (which somehow vanished--amazing because I have O's of every single other photo i've shot) was horrifically backlit so i took out the little you could see behind the subject. All it was was a few car doors, and other stuff--parking lot was pure white. I'd be interested to see what you folks think I could do with one. I do wanna avoid black and white though--i like the blues in the coat and such too much to change it.

Of adjusments with brightness and contrast and trying to stay with your original here is my effort on improving it.Hope you dont mind.
Bobby

[Elysian]

It's messed up too much. The extraction of the background wasn't done properly and the rest of the shot has severe problems with all kind of glows.

[another view]

This is a tough one - looks like there's some lens flare from the back lighting that's making it look soft (low contrast). It is very difficult (well, I can't do it...) to take care of this problem. I'd try to re-shoot it and - if you can't attach a lens hood - maybe bring the lighting around to the front a little. If it's natural light, have the subject fact the light a little more.

[opus]

What do you think of this?

I did an "Apply Image" Overlay of 75%. Then I opened curves and made the white point the background (didn't see any effect) and then -- this is what caused the warmer color shift -- I took the grey point eyedropper and chose a spot right in the middle of the coffee cup cap, right where you see that round indentation: the very middle of the 'vignette' on the "wall" between the floor of the indentation and the top of the cap. Play with it till you see the warm color you want. Then, I did a tiny curves adjustment, bringing the midtones up a bit, then bringing the shadows back down to normal, and I don't think I touched the highlights.

Tell me what you think.