Miscellaneous > The Sallyport

Photography and portraits

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Sir Wolf:
ah but bdus are cotton not wool too ;) i dont wash my uniform unless its a display event or dday where i need to look clean. the 41 jackets are cotton exterier, what you can't see is my right arm is black from my belly craw under a machine gun nest hehehe. it's still fun though. we get dirty then clean up. we do 12+ events a year and after 3 years the only thing that shows it's wear is the boots.

Sir Edward:

--- Quote from: SirNathanQ on 2012-04-01, 00:40:23 ---Some more. Basically I'm hoping they're good enough to photoshop into something nice by someone who knows how to photoshop    *Hint Hint*  8)

--- End quote ---

These aren't too bad, overall. The only thing is that these are mostly 720 pixels high. I'd much rather work with images that are 2000 or larger.

As we discussed, the black background isn't bad, it just becomes a problem if there's something on you that's black that it's right in front of the black background, because it gets lost.

The lighting is fantastic on these. No sharp shadows.  This is surprising since it looks like a camera flash was used. Normally this is bad. But basically, this is the kind of lighting to aim for if you want to do photoshop projects, specifically diffuse lighting. Outdoor shots work great for this too if it's shaded or overcast, and no "noisy" background.

Rule of thumb-- The final product is only as good as the pictures you work from, so if the original is blurry, over-exposed, or badly jpeg compressed, there's only so much you can do to fix it. That is, I don't have the skill or patience to fix a bad photo, and I doubt anyone else here would either. :)

I already posted this one in another thread, but I'll share it again here. This was maybe a 5-10 minute hack. I made use of the pure-black background to blast out the contrast to get the mask I needed to lift Nathan out of the picture. Then it just took some color adjusting and minor touch-ups around the edges, and paste in a background and apply a blur to that background. Done.

Sir Edward:
I just thought I'd post a quick example of really basic retouching, using a picture taken by Sir Brian's lovely wife. Images often come off the camera with poor contrast. I think in an effort to make the images not come out too dark, often the deep black and dark colors get washed out.

A simple two-step process I often use is to hit it with "Levels" in photoshop, to adjust the black and white levels on the histogram to get the dark blacks and bright whites back, and then use "Curves" to give it an S-curve for the contrast, deepening the darks and brightening the lights.

Sometimes I'll go on and do more to the picture, but these two steps can do wonders for most pictures.

Sir James A:
Wow, nicely done. I need to try this soon on a few of my own.

Sir Brian:
Well done Sir Edward! Your retouched photo is much better than the original! :)

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