Before & After peek | North Metro Atlanta Newborn, Children, Family and Senior Photographer

I thought I'd share one of my favorite pictures from my last session of 2011. I was very fortunate to catch  this Super Hero face. I'm told it scares away the bad guys. Now who wouldn't want to be a damsel in distress if there's a super hero this cute who's going to come to the rescue ?

The Before & After will enable you to see the difference between getting portraits at your favorite neighborhood portrait chain and a custom portrait with a professional.

This picture was taken  indoors with very flat lighting. There was a huge chandelier above his head which worked for me as a hair light giving the lovely shine to his hair. In post processing, I brightened his face some to give it a soft glow. I then removed a red spot that looked like a bug bite on his right cheek and finally finished it off by removing the white stain from the vest and the little thread hanging from near the button. I think its the small details that go into creating a good picture.
And yes I used a nekked powered down flash to directly illuminate him. I could have thought of bouncing the flash across a wall and positioning him better and a million different other things but guess what? I would have MISSED THIS SHOT  because it was completely. impromptu.

Differences in a black and white edit

A non-professional might feel that a black and white picture is a black and white picture and its "simple" and "easy" to create. Right?? If that were true, my chocolate cake made in my GE oven would taste and look the same as my good friend Lydia's who makes AWESOME very professional looking and tasting cakes ! ( My cake making skills are limited to using out-of-the-box mixes and I bake a couple of times a year). She does use the same GE oven though. However, people don't come away raving after eating my cake as they do having had hers. Hmm wonder why ???

Here are a few sample B&W edits of the same picture using Photoshop's in-built menu options and the same picture edited using a detailed non-photoshop-in-built process.

1. Edited using Photoshop's Hue Saturation Adjustment in the layer's palette. All I did was bring the saturation all the way down and adjusting the lightness

Pay close attention to the edges of the bokeh in the background. You can see rings in the bokeh. Not very pleasing to the eye. How long did it take? It was pretty quick. One click to add the adjustment and then a couple of seconds to bring the Saturation slider down and adjust the lightness.


2. Lets look at the next picture edited using Photoshop's "black and white" option, again an adjustment in the layer's palette.

Again, look at the bokeh. Not very appealing. The image also looks kind of flat and oomphless. It took  me a second to click the option and about 5 seconds for photoshop to do its thing

3. Edited manually using custom techniques.

The above picture was carefully edited following various steps, burning a little here, dodging a little there, adding various overlays to get this final product. In this picture, you can actually see several different shades from the blackest of black to the whitest of white. It took me about 15 minutes to complete this edit. A lot of time in my books but it was time well spent.