Fix Your Photo Friday Winner for May 10th

Congrats to Susan Wolfe-Stoker for winning this week’s Fix Your Photo Facebook Friday contest. The photo she submitted is of her dog, Rosie. Susan has this to say about Rosie:

“She is around 8-9ish. We “fostered” her for about 3 days before we knew she was ours. She was going to be put down in the shelter because she was so scared of people. That was 4 years ago now and she LOVES being around people! She was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma last Oct and just finished her chemo…. She is in remission and will hopefully be around for a long time to come!  I managed to luck out when taking this pic and got a great pic of her tounge!”

Here is the photo as submitted on our Facebook page:

Here is the photo after a quick fix-up in Photoshop:

Tips on how to take a photo like this:

Overall, I think Susan did a real nice job. The composition of the photo is great! I love the way that it is cropped so that the dog is coming diagonally out of the corner and the wood planks are coming toward the viewer. I’m not sure if she did this intentionally or not… but it adds a lot of interest to the photo (so does that crazy tongue!).  It is pretty sharply focused, so she must have had her camera at the correct settings. As mentioned in last weeks winning entry post, the best basic setting to use with a point and shoot camera would be either the “Kids and Pets” or “Sports” setting because they automatically set all of the technical stuff in your camera to take a photo of a fast moving subject.

The problem with taking photos in the bright sunlight is that you are going to get a lot of harsh shadows and bright highlights. So, you will lose detail in both the darkest and lightest areas of the photo. See how the white fur on her face and her left eye have almost no detail in them? This could be avoided by taking the photo in a shady area but that’s not always possible. One little trick you can use is to turn on the flash on your camera. Read your camera’s manual to see if you have a “fill flash” setting. This will reduce the amount of flash coming from the camera to just enough to fill in the dark shadows so you have detail in them. It’s not going to help you with the bright highlights though. Another option is to block the sun on your subject with your own shadow, someone else’s shadow or with an object like an unbrella.

For the semi-pros out there:

 I would use your spot metering mode to focus your exposure on just the dog. Lock your exposure reading in on the brightest part of the dog’s fur that is being hit by the sun. This will ensure that you don’t blow out your highlights. You can always lift the dark shadows during post-processing but it’s real hard to get back the detail in blown out highlights. Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to adjust this photo:

I made a duplicate layer copy and then used a filter in the Adjust 4 series by Topaz Labs called Portrait Drama which opened up the shadows, calmed down the highlights and brought out a great deal of detail in the fur. The default settings were lacking a bit of color for my taste. So, I bumped up the saturation slider a bit to give it a little pop.

 Then once I applied that adjustment and was back in Photoshop, I used a Kubota action called Digital Fill Flash (which is really just a curves adjustment layer that brightens up the entire photo and then adds a layer mask that is filled with black). I then painted with white in the layer mask to brighten up the dark shadows a little more. This basically does what using a fill-flash on your camera would do:

Don’t forget to visit our Facebook Page this Friday to enter your photo in the contest to win a free makeover. Or take a look at our photo correction services page for details on how to get your photos fixed.

~Susan