Roses

Lots of pictures I like. I took a lot too because I'm very harsh on my own pics. THe intention was for the DSP weekend challenge. First one is 50mm portrait. 2nd one is something you are thankful for. Being me, I always optimize. So, I'm thankful for these roses. And this will also go to portrait session because it is my portrait.







I love many of these pics. This one is showing my affection of the flowers.












One thing I noticed is I'm getting old. My face skin is not that firm anymore even with lots of sleep over the whole thanksgiving weekend. Can't pretend to be 17 like when I was 21. I really like my new hair style with a bow in the back.

Take away:
-portraits are the best with 50mm. Human look best with 50mm lens.
- tungsten light is very bad. Photoshop can whiten it pretty decently. Might be a bit yellowish still.
- RAW is useful when my lighting is not good. But during day-time with good soft light, I didn't have to do much changes to theses pics.
- camera can take RAW+L. It's quite useful. For that case, RAW is my backup. It's good for me so for the ones I want to adjust, I can edit their RAW. The rest I can just take the camera's JPEG if they are good enough.

Color boosting, hair retouch, liquify

First pic is original
Second pic was sharpened using MCP action.
Third pic was more photoshoped based on saved jpg of second photo.

Third pics
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- Used Adjustment layer with color saturation, then used layer mask to erase the layer on humans. (so that we wont look reddish)
- My legs have hard flash hotspot. Just followed this tutorial for fixing it. Very good tutorial.
- hand painted with eye-drop color. Then reduce the opacity.
- Then layer mask /inverse layer mask for some adjustments.
- high pass the overlay mode of background copy. This will bring the texture of skin back.
- The frame is from MCP photoshop actions , free download.
- marque selected my top hair and painted red. I haven't learned eye drop tool, so I just chose red from color pallet, so it's not a good job. Should have done this, just like fixing flash hotspots:
- duplicate the background and work on it
- use eye dropper tool to pick nearby hair color. Then hand paint the top head on background copy
- reduce opacity to blend in.
- bring texture back by high pass filter on another duplicate background with overlay mode.
- layer mask or inverse layer mask to

Depth of Field