Every generation

Comments are welcome.

it would be much improved with about 20 seconds i n photoshop. adjust the levels so you have a pure black and a pure white, and possibly bump up the saturation a tiny bit... maybe not.

 

mainly, the problem is it's just too flat, but that could certainly be corrected.

 

i've attached a copy that i basically just did auto levels and contrast and adjusted the hue and saturation slightly.

very evocative scene mel, glad you shared this one. the composition and crop works beautifully to tell a story, and the placement of the teacher and his hand writing across the paper that means so much to the boys is terrific -- nicely off centered. I agree that the colors are a little flat, but also, this is just the kind of image I like to play with in other tones. By going grayscale, you can subtedly shade and manipulate tones more than in color to emphasize what's important in the scene (here, i think the teacher and boy to his right are the emotional center) and, given the old world feel of this, I also suggest considering some sort of tint that suggests an older photo. I took a shot at it to give you some ideas. I also sharpened the people some.

Greg and Ben, thank you both for your comments and for taking the time to make the adjustments in Photoshop.

 

I was surprised to see that the jpg image in my portfolio was so flat. The PSD file has a full gamut and makes prints with a very good tonal range on my 2200 printer. I actually did a great deal of Photoshop work on this image. It was scanned from Kodak Gold 800 film (yuck). The scene was shot with four different kinds of lighting falling on it: institutional ceiling lights, incandescent floor lamps, window light, and on-camera flash. The best scan I could make was horribly grainy, oversaturated, and contrasty. I used Imagenomic Noiseware to reduce the grain and noise, and because of the different color lighting in different parts of the image, I had to crank down the saturation considerably. Fortunately the main subjects are children, so the softness and lack of saturation aren't as disturbing to me as they would be in some other image.

 

The four images I posted in my portfolio for critique were my first ones; I'm going to have to work harder on the jpg conversions in going from Adobe RGB to sRGB and also upload files with less compression. (I was especially disappointed in the B&W landscape I posted. It lost a lot of detail.)

 

Ben, thanks for the idea of converting this image to a tinted B&W. I'm going to give it a try.

 

 

Mel, found it accidently, and loved the subject. I liked the way you have composed it. and the way Ben has sharpened and converted it to B/W . I find it more impressive in that way.I understand that you have had many problems with light sources here, but the good composition and the atmospher it brings are well done. Pnina

Greg, Ben, and Pnina, thank you again for your encouragement and very kind comments. I decided to give this one more try in Photoshop to see if I had learned enough to do better than the last time I tried. Here's the result. Also, I uploaded a much larger file than the first one. Please let me know what you think of this version. And I'm still going to see what I can do with it in B&W.