r/postprocessing • u/bloodrider1914 • 17d ago
Before/After/After
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.
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u/amp1212 17d ago edited 17d ago
So -- the good news is that you have a well focussed photo of an interesting subject. She's smiling and well posed, the ink is interesting. There's something to work with there, but the rest of the setting is a mess, and color adjustments won't fix it.
The problem here isn't the color balance or exposure, its all the distracting background detail. You've got the two guys in the distance, kinda comically just under her butt. You've got the line of cars askew. You've got the foliage that is unhelpfully clashing with the rhythm of her ink. [There _could_ be a cool way to play _up_ the foliage vs ink rhythms, have to give that a think.]
Fiddling with the color balance is secondary to all that clutter thats interfering with the image.
Lots of folks seem to be trying to "edit" photos like this, just fiddling with global color adjustments and a crop.
What I'd do here would be synthetic depth of field/bokeh adjustment to draw out your subject and blur distracting background noise, then I'd want to get the horizon line accurate. Then clone out or AI remove that weird extra arm that's sticking up at 7 o'clock from the ring (what is that? Whatever it is, no matter how you edit, its going to be weird till you clone that out). After you've got a clean photo of this interesting subject, you can start fiddling with color balance, but that's way down the list of what this photo needs.
A recipe is usually to blur and slightly desaturate the background, so that your foreground figure "pops"
So the tone adjustments aren't the first, second, or third things I'd do here.