righty

[natgaines]

First and foremost let me say trying to chase around a 1 year old with a camera for an hour was exhausting. I just want to commend all the parents out there, I soooo have my work cut out for me when I finally become a mother!!! :mad2: So I saw another member use this effect in their picture and have been trying to figure out it's magic. Thanks to the wombat I realized it had a name and have been playing around with the Orton Effect all evening. This might not have been the best picture for it but wondered what you guys thought? I attached the unedited and then the Orton with some adjustments to the color.

Without

With

[zen]

Very nice! I think maybe you should check out the shadow/highlight adjustment in PS. It'll help to even things out a bit w/out really lowering your overall contrast. It's in Image>Adjustment>Shadow/Highlight.
I have also found that when softening an image it's helpful to sharpen the sharp layer a bit.
And if you want that kind of soft haze over the whole image duplicate your blurred image again and leave the blend mode set to normal, then adjust the opacity. You may even want to blur it more for that layer.
Great work,especially for a first attempt, though.

[A.M.D.A.]

Very nice!:thumbsup:

I like the blurred background, catchlight in the girl's eye, as well as the facial expression.

However, the "hot-spot" on a side of her face tends to draw my eye repeatedly. Other than this, I think it's a pretty well done image.

#2 looks a little over-softened for my taste. Somewhere between #1/#2 should ideal.

-Alex

[natgaines]

Zen, thanks for the comments! I think I did darken it some with that feature in PS before I did the layering/blur. Do you think it needs more or less shadow, more or less highlight? I didn't particularly care for the original images color so I tryed to brighten the colors up some? Again, PS is still pretty foreign to me, so thanks for the suggestion. =) I'll try more and less blur with the same image and see what I get.

Alex, when you say hotspot are your referring to the place on her forehead above the leaf? I noticed it blew out, in addition to her arm and the bottom portion of the leaf when I used that screen effect to do this orton effect. Is there any way to specifically pinpoint making these specific areas not so bright? I know I could darken the whole thing but I don't want to darken my background too much? I'm finding this particular problem in a lot of images, I'll have to do some research because it's increasingly frustrating! Thanks for your comments and suggestions!

Nat

[LeeIs]

I like both variations, the normal look (even though somewhat over exposed) and the dreamy shot. The good qualities for the normal shot for me is it's sharpness. The good quality for the dreemy one is just that, its dreamyness. I wish i had a merge. where the foreground or the subject was more of the sharp kind and the background dreamy. one can achieve this in any image editing software. I like the concept and of course the subject

[gahspidy]

This is a very nice photo and I too like both versions for different reasons. I do like the dreamy effect of the orton look alot and it works here well. I do think though that in the process you lost shadow detail and your colors became over saturated. I would ditto the suggestions of zen in using the shadow highlight tool, or you could just try slimply reducing contrast with the simple contrast slider. I also would like to see you reduce the saturation some as it starting to look posterized in certain spots.
It's agreat moment and wonderful portrait. Your chasing her around paid off!