Eyes are the windows to the soul. Whether we are photographing portraits or pets, we often need to photograph the eyes very clearly. Relatively speaking, posed shots are easier to take, while snapshots are much more difficult. When we half-press the shutter to autofocus, if we go a little slower, we won't be able to capture the ideal dynamics.
In this example, I will talk about some tips on how to use Adobe Camera Raw combined with Photoshop to refresh your photos. In order to illustrate the problem, I chose a defective photo to explain.
Friends who need to practice with the original file or view the shooting parameters of the original file can download it here: http://bbs.jcwcn.com/viewthread.php?tid=251632
On Sunday, I took my sweet Qi Ruibing to the pet market and met this energetic little dog. His active nature makes him unable to stop for a moment. The moment it turned its head, I pressed the shutter button and quickly focused to take this photo.
I used a 50mm 1.4D lens to shoot. In order to blur the background and reduce the linear effect of out-of-focus, I set the aperture to f2.2 and shot at a closer distance. When I focused on the eyes and pressed the shutter, the dog shifted a little. Coupled with the shallow depth of field, the light and shadow in the eyes were a little blurry.
Use Adobe Bridge to preview. This picture is a vertical shot. Click the "Rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise" button in the upper right corner of the Bridge to stand it upright.
In this example, the color correction and optimization part will be performed in Adobe Camera Raw. After the color correction and sharpening is completed, only the eyes will be carefully repaired in Photoshop, and no overall large-scale adjustments will be made. Therefore we do not need to use 16-bit channels. Directly below the Adobe Camera Raw window, click the settings button marked 1, and set the channel to 8-bit in the pop-up window, as marked 2.
Raw files have not been optimized, and the first impression is that they are very bland, the colors are not bright enough, and the light and shade are not widened.
So we need to adjust the color in the "Basic" option. Increase the contrast between light and dark and give it an appropriate white balance.
The photo was taken at noon, the dog was under the umbrella, and the color temperature was relatively high. I set the color temperature value to 4150 and the hue to -3 to make the yellowish color of the dog normal.
I have already discussed the following setting parameters in detail in the previous article "ACR+PS Retouching and Adjustment Simple Process" and will not go into details in this article. The general adjustment process is explained here.
Increase the brightness and exposure to brighten the overall image and make the highlights brighter.
Increase the black value to make the background more purified and reduce the interference of complex backgrounds. We can see that there are higher peaks on the left side of the histogram, which means that many pixels in the background have become pure black. Some friends who care about histograms will say that there is no detail in the dark parts. But doing this can purify the background. Photography is an art of reduction. There is no need to leave unnecessary things in the picture. Therefore, the histogram is only a reference, and specific situations must be treated on a case-by-case basis.
Appropriately increasing the contrast and transparency values can enhance the contrast of the image.
Increase the detail saturation and reduce the saturation value to make the image more vivid while avoiding the situation where the local area is too bright.
