Every once in a while you stumble on a shot that works. The young woman in today's image was just sitting in NYC's Central Park as we happened by. She an several friends were there to portray characters from anime. (see this companion post) The big deal with today's image is that's it's a straight shot. Maybe it was the makeup she wore, but her skin was that nice. Maybe it was that she was sitting under the arms of a tree, but the lighting was that soft. The colors of her dress and hat are as they were and she did have blue tint in her hair. The fact that she was a very good looking young woman didn't hurt either. The background was just as you see it (minus the vignette). There were a couple things that had to be done to "finish" the image, but they were very minor. To find out what they were, hit the "Read More".Because of the bright sun filtering through the trees, there was a slight blue caste to the white of her bodice and slips. Some can still be seen on the left of the image. On the right side it was all removed. The Luminance of the background foliage was brought down in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 using the HSL Panel. Rather than manipulating the colors manually, the automatic adjustment control (the small ball in the upper left of the HSP Panel) was used and the foliage targeted. Dragging the target down, with Luminance selected, caused the greens to go considerably darker. No adjustment was made to the focus on the trees.
Here gloves were lightened, again in LR3, using the Adjustment Brush. When using the Adjustment Brush I typically crank the Exposure value up as high as it will go. I then "paint" over the area needing refinement. Once the area is properly selected, a double tap on the word Exposure returns the value to a center (zero) position. The I'll bring the value up or down (up in this case) using a Shift/Up Arrow tapping. The other sliders will advance by .10 increments doing this. The Exposure Adjustment moves at .10 without the use of the Shift Key. Holding the Shift Key down moves the slider in 1/3 Stop increments. Increasing the Exposure of the gloves brought out the detail.
Both young women were very open to explaining what they were there for and, as you can see, this one was very welcoming. Sometimes you just get a cooperative model.