Fun Portrait to try and Salvage-Picture a day #23

I was going it quite a few directions tonight. Found a miniature angel under a lamp that was lit nice by the table lamp. Then my kids decided to tuck all their stuffed animals into bed on the sofa. After they were finished they sat still for a few seconds to capture a portrait. I’m a little bummed that my aperture was stuck on 2.8 because I was messing around with shooting wide open with a flash bounced off the ceiling. I would have rather been closer to ƒ/8 so that my daughters eyes would have been in focus. I liked the capture anyways and decided to play around with the tools to see what I could come up with.

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I
SO 1000 ƒ/2.8 T 1/80 with flash set on 1/128 manual and bounced off the ceiling.

Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:

r6-j4-kids-portrait-1-L.jpg

It’s a bit orange and obviously needed more flash to reach J’s face… So into Aperture for initial edits:

r6-j4-kids-portrait-2-L.jpg

I decided to move on the OnOneSoftware’s Photo Suite 6 to see what the effects would do:

r6-j4-kids-portrait-3-L.jpg

I then used a couple of other tools from Nik Software to try and sharpen up J’s eyes a bit more and then used Dfine2.0 to reduce the overall noise of the image. Obviously a lot more work than necessary had I gotten the exposure and flash settings right before I started!