Portrait of a Dancer

Hello Sankha

Colourful image. Looks like a tough lighting situation. I'm guessing it's on a stage with coloured overhead lighting. I might suggest using a higher ISO to allow a higher shutter speed and deal with the noise in pp. If it's blurry to start there isn't any thing to fix that. This isn't what I would say is blurry per se but it's soft. I might try to rework the original file to try and lower the contrast and get some more detail out of the dark areas. I might also add a bit to the sides and crop down a bit to get a more pleasing framing. I did an edit to try and lighten the face and the dark areas but can't get anything more out from the screen capture, I also rejigged the framing for your consideration. Just my 2 cents.

Regards

Greg 

Greg,

Thanks for your awesome review. Your edit looks so much better than mine.

Yes, it was a tough lighting situation with different colored lights beaming down on the stage.

I was trying to get the same results that you did by working with the raw file in Lightroom again. So, did you just decrease contrast, increase brightness and sharpen?

Thanks again.

Hello Sankha

Thanks. Actually I did a number of things. I was working in photoshop rather than lightroom. I added a layer with greatly decreased contrast and then changed the blend mode to soft light. Duplicated a stamped copy and converted it to high key monochrome and changed the blend mode to linear dodge. Added a hue/saturation layer to get some colour back into the mix. Increased the canvas size to be able to get a different crop. Added a dodge layer and a burn layer to selectively dodge and burn a bit, stamped a new layer and ran it through a noise filter and finally sharpened it. Now most of that was due to working with a screen capture. With a RAW file it should be much easier. I don't use lightroom too much myself other than when I develop my own RAW files but I think if you were to click on the auto button and then pull it back because it will go too far and then use the adjustment brush to selectively change the saturation and such and then some sharpening at the end. Hope that helps, good luck.

Regards

Greg

Thanks Greg.

Your comments are extremely useful for me as I am still learning photoshop. I will try your methods. Hopefully next time I will have better results.