Sunny day at the park!

[lemon]

Any suggestions? I took this today at the park, and can across this forum... thought it would be neat to see what can happen to it! :)
I use GIMP, so if anyone else does, please tell me how you did it!

Thanks everyone! Oh, and sorry it's sideways, I didn't know how to flip it!

Lemon

[Kaye]

Lemon, I think it is quite beautiful the way it is. I just flipped it for you.

2061

[ladyups]

Hi Lemon. Here is my take. I rotated it, cropped and turn it into a black and white. Since the sky was blown, I thought it would look better as a black and white. I loved the colors but would have preferred the sky to have been blue.http://i619.photobucket.com/albums/tt271/ladyups/IMG_3414_BW-1.jpg

[lemon]

Wow! Thanks! Being as I'm new to photography, and taking the online course offered here... can you tell me how I "blew" the sky? What could I have done to have kept it blue? I only yesterday discovered how to change my Aperture..lol.

[ladyups]

I'm not the best person to answer this question but I'll give it a shot. In my mind, there isn't a lot you could have done since it was such harsh light. I would have attempted to meter off the sky and then locked my exposure for that. Then recomposed and used my flash on fill flash to light up your little girl. It might not even have worked but its what I would have attempted first. Others on this forum are so much more knowledgeable then I am and they might step in and give their thoughts. Anytime you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. If you don't get an answer for a while, don't give up...we all have jobs and sometimes life gets in the way of the hobbies but most of the time, someone here will have an answer.

[coffee]

Mary's suggestion is a great on to try first if you have a flash handy. If not you can take two shots. The first like you have there, then one that meters for the sky, and merge the two in PS. If that isn't possible then you can always select the background that is blownout, and paste a different background into that area. I actually did this with your photo but since I don't have the time to put into it, some of the shot looks pasted in and was ashamed to post the example. But know that it's possible to do and make it look great.

[Kaye]

I like Mary's B&W version; and also enjoy trying to learn from the knowledge and ideas from both Mary & Joseph. I also thought it would be good to see the blue sky, but I personally think that the B&W wins.

2065

[owenmorris]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3633/3473477462_29963b27d9_b.jpg

[lemon]

Thank you so much for all your suggestions! They are all wonderful! :)

[StephenK]

Love this image Lemon! :)

The one thing that I do to many of my edits right off is to apply the appropriate blending mode to help
bring out the crispness in color and tone.

Remember this sequence for anyone using photoshop...

Add an unedited "Levels" Layer to your stack. Now, to that levels layer, set the blending mode that
the image is asking for based on the needs of the image itself.

In this case I set the blending mode to "Overlay"...

If the effect is to much you can always reduce it via the "Opacity" settings for this levels layer.

And of course you can also selectively reduce parts of it's effect, if you need to, by using the brush tool on the levels layer's mask.

I also selectively warmed up her skin with a Photo filter layer (Warming Filter 85)... and then some other little stuff, but those
were the biggies... :^)

[midimick]

One tip I have discovered when taking the pictures on a bright day like that - using a polarised filter helps reduce the washout and adds a crisp blue to the glary areas - such as sky and/or water.

The following photo is an example. It was taken at 1:00pm on a very sunny day. I put the camera on aperture priority and set a narrow aperture (F20) to give me the wide DOF for the landscape type shot, and used the polarising filter. Other than that, everything was automatic. The only modifications to the picture was cropping and resizing.

[Pat]

Hi Lemon. Got yourself a real cutie there. Basically, what I did was;
crop
colour sky area blue (slight gradient)
painted in clouds with "cloud brushes"
warmed skin tones
adjusted overall light
applied a "softening" filter

[jmtc]

Hi
I hope you like my attempt.
I Croped tight
went B&W
Because sky was so blown I blew out the face - making it look very modern (used curves for this)
with liquify tool made the eyes bigger and added an extra catch light.
I hope you like the result
Regards
Jim

[jmtc]

Hope you like my attempt.
I loved the photo, but I have croped it into B&W then blown it out fora fresh very modern look
Regards
JIM

[johnnya]

I'm not familiar with photoshop yet. I like Stephenk's version. I would be inclined to cover the silver screw near the right hand bottom corner with black as it's a bit distracting to me. A 3d framed effect might be cool too.
Nice capture