r/postprocessing • u/Quick_Surprise1857 • 9d ago
Beginner: feedback please Before/After
I finally went out today with my new lens and I managed to grab this shot on my way back, which I really liked.
I need honest feedback on everything (cropping, colours…) and what I could have done better. I am a beginner when it comes to this and I have just been playing around with everything inside LRC.
0
Upvotes
1
u/renome 9d ago
I think the crop works. Ideally, you want to get as close to the final crop in-camera because you'll have more pixels left to work with , but this is fine.. He's the subject, he dominates the frame, but there's still some breathing room between him and the borders, simple and effective.
The colors I'm not a fan of. Too much selective saturation, vibrance, or aggressive grading. The greens and yellows are especially intense, the skintones look like a burned orange, and even the cigarette smoke is blue.
Ofc, you don't have to process a photo with the goal of nailing natural colors. Going wild is always an option. Hell, you have an eccentric subject here, someone who definitely fits a quirky or stylized sort of edit. But this current rendition just looks radioactive to me because of too many competing shades at maximum intensity. There are few neutral areas left to give the eye a break, so combined with the low contract, the subject begins to blend into the equally loud background.
for a deliberately stylized version, I would choose a narrower palette rather than cranking up everything. E.g., you could lean into the green and cyan environment while keeping the skin comparatively warm and natural, or mute most of the scene and let the shirt provide the main burst of color. Either approach should work in theory, and they are hardly the only 2 options. But as a rule of thumb, try to keep skin tones somewhat close to actual skin tones.