Boy Portrait for Review

[GP]

Hello to all  :)

I am currently working on 2 pictures from this family. This is the 1st one for review. The blue channel of this portrait contains most of the damage. Using a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer and setting the blue channel to 0 and using only the red and green channels gave me a good starting point.
But there is a tight line between getting rid of the noise and keeping what little detail there is in the shirt.
Please let me know what you think.

       

[Mhayes]

Hi GP,

This photo brings up the question of why? I don't think it was meant to be a high key photo, but having a light to almost white background and the shirt white is hard to seperate the kid from the background. I think the marks you see on either side are probably damage---it could even be closer to what the background was originally. I think it is distracting, so I would remove it.

I'm for keeping some of the noise. I played around with it and my background needs some work, but what I tried to do was get some seperation of the shirt from the background. I think your restore of the boy looks great and the background might be the only thing I would work on. I'm not sure that I'm all that sold on what I have done either.




Margie

[Tess (Tassie D)]

I had a go too. I ended up darkening the right side of the background and running a tiny burn line down the edge his shirt.

[Hannie]

Hi Gerlinde,

Sometimes when I have a restore like this I will duplicate the layer and from the Image pull down menu I pick Adjustments-> Shadows/Highlights and accept shadows level and move highlights to 2.
It will bring out more detail in the white and dark areas, contrast will suffer a bit.

Hannie

[Pat]

Great tip Hannie  :up:

Pat

[Mhayes]

Hannie, I keep forgetting that great tip. I like what both you and Tess have done. I'm somewhat torn in wanting just a little more shadows like Tess has in the face.

Margie

[GP]

Hi everyone  :loveit:

Thank you all for the great tips and suggestions.

Margie, I am glad you said I should get rid of the dark stripes on the background. I was not sure if they were part of the design or just an artifact.

I like all your renditions, it is funny, how we all come up with something different for the same photo.  ;D

This is helping me tremendously to finish the restore.

Thank you all so much.  :hug:

[schen]

Thanks Hannie for the tips.  I am used to adjust highlight/shadow in Lightroom but always forgot them in PhotoShop.  Instead, I struggled with curve most of the time.

Shujen

[GP]

This will be my final version if nobody objects  ;D



Thank you again for all the help, especially Hannie.

:hug:

[Mhayes]

GP, your final is absolutely beautiful!  :up:

Margie

[GP]

Thank you Margie! I will be sending it back to you.  :loveit:

[Hannie]

Lovely result Gerlinde!

:up2:

Hannie