Posted by on Feb 7, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments

Last month my son and daughter-in-law said they wanted some new photos of their two children for framing and mounting on their dining room wall.  They asked me if I had taken any shots recently that might be good candidates.  I knew that I had three or four good ones of our grandson but none of our granddaughter that I thought were suitable.  A couple of weeks ago my wife and I spent a long weekend with them, and I took the opportunity to take some shots of our granddaughter.  Actually, I took a lot of shots.  The trick, of course, is to take many shots and hope that one or two of them will turn out to be really special.  I transferred the photos from my camera to my laptop in Camera RAW format and imported them into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom After previewing each shot, I opened the one shown below and checked focus and dynamic range. 

The focus is excellent.  The dynamic range is not as a great as I would like, but it is good enough, and I will adjust brightness after final cropping.

The next step is to crop the image for a framed portrait.  I wanted to crop out the beige colored wall to her right and to keep the orange and blue ribbon attached to the balloon trailing behind her.  I noted that there is a small keystone effect resulting from the downward angle of the camera.  I adjusted for the keystone effect using the vertical transform adjustment slider in Lightroom and then cropped the image.  The result of these two steps is shown below.

I like having her face in the right-hand third of this image.  When I took the photo, she was running past me, so having her face on the right with the mysterious ribbon trailing behind suggests motion and that she is about to exit the frame stage right.

Finally, I increased the brightness slightly in Lightroom.  The result appears below.

As cropped, this image file is 2066 pixels x 2661 pixels.  At 240 pixels per inch, it will make a nice 8″ x 10″ or 8.5” x 11” print.  If I make a print on canvas, I will need to return to the original and crop it a little larger for the purpose of having some image to wrap around the sides of the canvas frame.

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