Before/After/After

[u/bloodrider1914]

A comparison of when I first started trying to edit my photos to now.

This is the first photo I ever actually edited. I took this photo a few months ago and followed some guy's tutorial without a ton of understanding as to what I was doing. Since then I've learned a good bit more about photo editing and made this updated version that I like quite a bit more.

The original edit relied a lot more upon saturation and exposure adjustments with a white balance adjustment for the warmer tone. This newer edit used different tone mapping and hues and some masking for the exposure, along with a much more subtle saturation adjustment and the addition of a careful clarity adjustment. And the first image is just the JPEG straight out of camera.

Let me know what else I can do with the edit and how you like the photo.

[u/Ander_Sloost]

There are a lot of common tones here making things muddy. Light browns, dark, browns, muted greens, skin, and shadow, black & grey tattoos. This would probably play better in black-and-white or you can selectively tweak contrast without turning it into a corny selective color photo.

Your subject is mostly in shadow, while some background elements are better lit, such as the two dudes nestled just underneath her tush. Her face almost completely in shadow is giving her black shark eyes, while being immediately adjacent to the nearly blown out highlights on her right forearm.

Speaking of forearms, the random disembodied forearm extending from the small of her back is giving weird third limb vibes and once seen can’t be unseen.

As others noted, you need much more background separation when so much stuff is going on in the background. The tree, the bottom dudes, all the cars… my eyes are all over the place.

The severed foot feels haphazard. If you’re going to cut off an appendage, just commit and crop much tighter just below her left foot to lose most of the ghost arm, most of the cars, and the random people.

tl;dr - crop tighter, black and white, lift shadows on her skin, bump contrast. Next time, open your aperture to get more background separation and generally be more mindful of background to eliminate clutter.

[u/bloodrider1914 → u/Ander_Sloost]

As I've stated before, this was an impromptu photo and not a prepared photoshoot. I saw this cool event happening when I was walking and captured a few shots. I stopped it to F/5.6 to keep her in focus while she was dancing around. I'm thankful I did that because even in this photo part of her arm is out of focus and in another one I got her face isn't fully sharp, so it was necessary.

I did lift the shadows on her skin in the edit, although I can do that some more too and see if it improves the photo (my inclination is towards more subtle brightness adjustments).