Photography Composition & RAW Editing

Hi everyone! I've been out taking a few photos with my darling Millicent and I've wanted to get into editing RAW files instead of just simply settling for the default JPEG output of the camera I use. As such, I would appreciate any criticisms or feedback on a few pictures I've taken and processed recently, including anything about them (composition, lighting, editing, etc), positive or negative.

For context, I'm using the program Darktable (Similar to Adobe Lightroom) to edit these RAW files. Also, the photos in this post are compressed (Especially the "RAW" photos, which I've compressed to 40% quality JPEGs, the processed photos are 80% quality), so forgive any JPEG artifacts!

 

First Photo

RAW:

Processed:

For this first photo, I've tried to frame her using the rule of thirds, with one downwards line intersecting with her right shoulder and the other at her left elbow, to frame her body in the centre third. I've also balanced her eyeline around the upper third line.

Because of the way RAW photography tends to work, the original RAW is also quite dark, darker than it was in reality, so I've brought some light back into the image in editing. This will be the case for the following images also. In general, when editing the RAWs, I've adjusted white and black relative exposure, as well as adding contrast and increasing vibrance, chroma, saturation and brilliance all by varying amounts, though usually brilliance I only increase very slightly, since it easily blows out the image.

 

Second Photo

RAW:

Processed:

This one didn't even need a crop, I felt she was quite nicely seated along the centre of this photo, with the branch she is setting on clearly visible to the left and a backdrop of leaves and the ocean behind her.

As for lighting, there's quite an intense highlight on her hair, while the rest of the image is a bit dark. I tried to bring back in the light to her face and hair, but I'm not sure I've done it as effectively as a could, but I'd need to experiment more to figure out how to get a better result. I'm pretty sure I could get it better, though, since the camera's own JPEG output (not pictured here) managed to bring more light to her face than I have here.

 

Third Photo

RAW:

Processed:

This time, a well lit photo, not taken in the shade! I've cropped it using the rule of thirds again, aligning her body with the right third line, which I think creates a reasonably balanced composition, though I'm more than willing to hear criticisms about my compositions. I am a bit bothered by the pole behind her head though, wasn't paying much attention to it in the moment, but I feel it does take away from the image just a little.

As for editing, I made similar adjustments to the previous two images. I think it turned out reasonably will, though I notice the highlights on her hair are quite bright, though I don't think it's too much. Maybe I could have also tried to bring out a little more colour from the image, since it is quite a bright and colourful scene.

 

Anyway, these are all the photos I have to share for today! Any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, questions or even just comments on them are appreciated! I need friends, haha.

Millicent is lovely! Photography is a mystery to me, so I can't really offer much advice but I really enjoyed reading about the thoughts you put into the composition of your photos! There's a lot of fun stuff you can do with that!

The processed photos look great! Learning photography is a long road—I'm not even there yet and I've been doing it for many years. I don't know anything about Darktable, as I actually do use Adobe Photoshop (thank you, university 😘), but if it is anything like it, a very useful tool when editing RAW files is the Histogram. If you can find it in your program, it should have two arrows on each side of its screen; if an arrow is white, that means there's lost data, but if a single color shows, only that color has lost data. You want to kind of horizontally center everything in the screen, with no colored arrows. That means your photo doesn't have any lost data. It gives the photo good quality color as well!

On 8/4/2024 at 2:38 AM, Azurluna said:

As for lighting, there's quite an intense highlight on her hair, while the rest of the image is a bit dark. I tried to bring back in the light to her face and hair, but I'm not sure I've done it as effectively as a could, but I'd need to experiment more to figure out how to get a better result. I'm pretty sure I could get it better, though, since the camera's own JPEG output (not pictured here) managed to bring more light to her face than I have here.

With Lightroom you would use the masking tool to make a mask and then brighten just the face; presumably you're using a similar feature in your app. What I would suggest for situations like this is mind the direction of your light source, if the sun is behind her, you don't want "sunlight" on her face, and use it sparingly so it doesn't look overdone. Again with Lightroom, you can select the entire background with a button push and darken it if you want your entire image to have a higher exposure, but you don't want the background to appear blown out. In outdoor daylight, the sun, wherever it is, should always the brightest light source, and no amount of artificial / reflected light should compete with it.

The goal is to capture as much data in the raw file as you can given your camera's dynamic exposure range, and given the brightness of the sky, I think you exposed pretty well. 

One thing to play around with is how much you can under or over expose in different lighting conditions and still make a good image in post; camera models will vary a bit on this.

Unfortunately, the only books I know for RAW editing advice are Adobe-centric.

 

On 8/4/2024 at 2:38 AM, Azurluna said:

I've tried to frame her using the rule of thirds, with one downwards line intersecting with her right shoulder and the other at her left elbow, to frame her body in the centre third. I've also balanced her eyeline around the upper third line.

 

There are some good books on portrait composition, but I have found that dolls are difficult to reproduce human light setups for; their faces are too small, the lights are too big, and anime dolls don't have normal noses. A lot of portrait lighting just reproduces the same dramatic lighting used by the great portrait painters of old, but it doesn't work as well with an anime nose.

One of my favorite portrait examples is a boxer wearing his gloves, which are raised in front of him, and one thirds line was on his eyes, while the other was on his gloves, and it made a great promotional head-shot for the boxer. The books also tend to go into exceptions to the thirds rule. 

A similar example with my Utena, one thirds line is on her eyes, and one is on the pommel of her sword and the rose. IMO, the rose is a bit too bright and I should probably go back and darken it a tiny bit. I think a rule is that you want people to be drawn to the eyes over other elements in a portrait, and in this case having a bright white object on a thirds line pulls you away from her eyes. I usually brighten the eyes a bit too, but I didn't here. IMO, those sort of adjustments need to be done sparingly, so they aren't obvious as edits to the image.

Utena - Der Rosenkavalier-11023.jpg by Cult of Athena, on Flickr

Portrait, imo, is one of the hardest types of photography, but at least dolls are patient subjects.

6 hours ago, BeyondTime said:

snip

Thanks for giving such a detailed reply. Definitely gives me some info to work with. Certainly will look at taking different exposures to experiment with and adjusting specific parts of certain photos in post (sparingly, of course!). Learning how to utilise lighting in general is something I need to practice.

Also, love your photo of Utena there, she looks pretty and handsome 😄

5 hours ago, Azurluna said:

Also, love your photo of Utena there, she looks pretty and handsome 😄

Same image, but with the flower darkened a bit, and the eyes lightened a bit.

Utena - Der Rosenkavalier-11023-2.jpg by Cult of Athena, on Flickr

On 8/6/2024 at 2:09 AM, condogenate said:

The processed photos look great! Learning photography is a long road—I'm not even there yet and I've been doing it for many years. I don't know anything about Darktable, as I actually do use Adobe Photoshop (thank you, university 😘), but if it is anything like it, a very useful tool when editing RAW files is the Histogram. If you can find it in your program, it should have two arrows on each side of its screen; if an arrow is white, that means there's lost data, but if a single color shows, only that color has lost data. You want to kind of horizontally center everything in the screen, with no colored arrows. That means your photo doesn't have any lost data. It gives the photo good quality color as well!

To add a little more to my post about histograms, I did a little demonstration for you! Although this is done in Adobe Photoshop, if Darktable is similar, I would be very surprised if it doesn't have the same function!

I started off with the original image. The panel with the red arrow and yellow circle is the Histogram. As you can see, the data is cut off for red on the left side (dark).

The first thing I always do (besides up the vibrance, which I do with all my photos but didn't bother to mark here because it's a aesthetic choice) is move the Exposure slider so where most of the data in the Histogram is centered. My original photo was too dark, so I moved the slider a little to the right (light) to brighten the photo a bit. In doing so, the data is centered, just like we wanted. You don't want to pull it too far though, or you'll make it overexposed (I'll explain later).

Then I pulled the Contrast slider to the left to make the image less contrasted, which pulled the data even more into the center. Notice how, after I had done so, I finally got blank arrows on both sides of the Histogram. That means we've got a good exposed photo, but we're not done yet!

Now it's time to play around with the other sliders in the area! Highlights make whites bright, shadows make blacks dark, whites make whites very bright, and blacks make blacks very dark. Pulling it to the left makes the colors darker, and pulling to the right makes them brighter. You'll have to play around with the sliders a bit to get a completely good-looking photo, but keep it centered and without any colors in the arrows.

Don't pull the Exposure slider too far to the right (light), otherwise you'll blow out all the colors. This is overexposure. The white arrow means that the white data was cut off and is no longer usable.

And the same goes to pulling the Exposure slider too far to the left (dark). This is underexposure. The black data will be cut off and would be no longer usable. You don't want either of these scenarios, because that means you won't be able to do anything with those colors when you're further editing your photos with other sliders.

I hope I explained the Histogram a little better than in my previous post. I apologize for my fairly vague post the first time! 🙂

Edited August 22 by chupakiba