Hi Christine thanks for sending your photos and let's get to your photo
portfolio review first of all your first picture made me smile because I've eaten
in this restaurant it's also a boutique hotel in my second home of San Miguel de
and a Mexico I absolutely love it there and this is a great shot and the reason
it's it's nice is it's well balanced whenever we have a situation where we
have the left side almost equivalent to the right side because of symmetry and
arches are wonderful symmetrical devices we always want to make sure they're
centered and you have done that perfectly a couple of things that we can
adjust now if this may have been an iPhone picture I'm not sure if you that
nice thing about advancements in iPhone photography and also in Android is if
you use the Lightroom app to actually take your pictures you can choose to
photograph them in raw and if so that allows you a lot of really interesting
abilities for example I'm going to go to my adjustment brush and what I'm going
to do is take exposure down a little bit but highlights down a lot and I'm going
to brush in more detail now because I'm working with a smaller JPEG file that
you emailed me it doesn't look all that good however if this was the original
and especially if it was a raw by me adjusting the highlights you see how
it's getting darker it wouldn't actually get darker but more detail would show up
here and this would sort of rescue the blown out we call it blown out
highlights and it's actually quite normal because you know behind this
glass you have a normal light and it's bright so this is normal
however that is correctable I'll just get rid of that for now okay next thing
I just feel a general we call a global adjustment on shadows
so we're just going to increase the shadows however we're going to decrease
the blacks and what that does is it gives us a sort of a lift in the overall
mid-tone brightness however we want to keep the the drama of reduced blacks so
let me show you a before and after so here's the original and here's the net
the corrected now it's very subtle I'll show you again okay really not much
however it does allow for a little bit more view ability I feel that it may be
a touch bluish down here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my
adjustment brush get rid of a reset my settings if from the last job I just did
I'm going to increase this temperature slider to the yellow slide yellow side
and I'm gonna adjust my brush a bit now what I'm going to do is I'm painting on
warmth this is an incredible tool that is part of a lot of Adobe products and
that just sort of reduced the coolness of the man and woman standing here plus
this area okay so let's look at the before and the after very small subtle
adjustments but makes the picture a little bit better okay so let's get to
your next shot I love the light on this you did a great job capturing this this
fantastic light just absolutely great now normally and this is also debatable
whether you should correct this or not a lot of people say I always want straight
lines in my architecture other people say no I want it to be exactly how my
camera photographed it well both answers are absolutely right but let's go down
to geometry and under geometry we're going to go to the upright we're going
to go to Auto now let me click on Auto just see how
the picture just automatically shifted I'm going to go to the before and here's
the after and what this does is the software analyzes straight lines and it
just straightens up the lines for you now again you may want the original and
that's great I actually I prefer this myself and
because I like detail and I'm a nitpicker this little missing brick
bothers me so we could either clone it or you could simply just crop it out and
cropping it out won't really hurt the picture at all okay otherwise I think
it's a really delightful shot and there's really nothing else you would
need to change or alter okay so I initially said oh great colors but then
I realized that what you're doing is you're connecting the the two elements
here so you have Pride Month and the librarian cleverly I is it a library is
it a bookstore I'm not sure but they cleverly and M must have taken a huge
amount of time to do this but sort of copied the colors of this rainbow into
the books now I feel there's a little bit of useless space up here so I would
tend to crop it like so okay that that sort of tightens up the picture a bit
better now about this man there's two ways to look at this a lot of people
would say it's a little bit tight
there's a when I see when I look at people that are on the edge of the frame
looking out a frame what that means to me is that they are contemplating
something that's heavy that's deep that could be troubling
could be
you know a tough issue in life that they're dealing with
compared to when let's say that he was sitting here and he had the same pose he
was sitting in this chair looking at his computer this way I would feel that he's
just a normal normal dude checking in checking his email everything's good but
because he's on this side very much you know looking out a frame then there's
something troubling him and that's what happens when we have people looking into
frame and people looking out a frame so I would suggest that you you did a good
job in this sense because he is he to me it looks like he's troubled with
something the only thing I would say is the laptop removes the poetic and
metaphoric elements for me I don't like it so I would tend to just get rid of
the laptop now yes there's a little bit there but you know it's not critical you
I kind of want to see that his full arm here or is elbow so I feel that this is
a stronger crop and it's more poetic more metaphoric hope that helps okay now
your next picture I looked at it I said oh this reminds me of the border of Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada it's the sort of the the flat area around
Sackville I don't think that that's what this is but regardless it's a really
nice shot and what I'm going to do is crop now first thing I want to say is
that your crop traditionally is is probably pretty accurate because when we
look at crop lines here is the top horizontal third and it's pretty much
just the way you had it right on where it should be for example we would have
the top of this mountain range you know intersect it not intersecting
but along the crop line however there it can that's sort of
debatable because what we could also do is have the horizontal upper rule of
thirds line actually working along the water's edge where the water or the mud
meets the the green let's take a look at this okay here's the before and here's
the after I feel that both are probably totally acceptable but for me I tend to
like this pick this version better okay so that's just a little cropping tool I
always try to find out where do I want my horizontal line to be okay so and
okay so you submitted for images and there we go and thank you so much
Christine for being a part of this portfolio review and I had it was a
great pleasure going through your images thanks so much