Mom-to-be with flowers
by jcluthe

Comment by Bear_Music:
**** C R I T I Q U E C L U B C O M M E N T ****

Side Note: I see you've been a member nearly 3 years, and this is your first challenge entry. You've never participated in the forums either. So I'd like to encourage you to do more of both; it's a great way to get involved and learn. I also notice most of your images are of Mexico, so I'd inject as a personal note that I'm a native of San Diego, and it feels like I've spent half my life crawling around in the wilds of Baja California, going back to the days before they built the trans-peninsular highway and it took over a week to travel from Ensenada to Cabo San Lucas... Anyway, on to the image:

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First, you entered a month-long Free Study, where the competition is fierce, and scored a 5.7, which is really quite a decent score; so to whatever extent you care about scores, you done pretty well :-) I'm going to base at least the first part of this critique on discussing how to improve the image's score at DPC; to a large extent these "improvements" also represent fundamental photographic principles, but they are also DPC-specific.

First off, the image is overall very "muddy" looking: it feels dark, it lacks luminance values, there's no "glow" to it at all, and this is disturbing to the viewer because we "expect" a scene of a woman in a field of flowers to be more luminous, you know? Now it's a pretty simple matter to process it using curves and a bit of local dodging on the face to get a better overall luminance. The face is especially important, because we really want the face to pop out of the BG here. Here's a quick makeover to show what direction it's possible to go in:



Note especially that the flowers now have a distinct, backlit look to them. This was down by opening a new hue/saturation adjustment layer and amping the yellow saturation up and then adjusting the brightness slider for the yellow to produce more contrast between the pure yellow of the flower rims vs the more neutral yellow of the flower centers.

So this is a distinct improvement in overall tones here. As a rule it would be best to do all this BEFORE doing the selective desaturation, but this was what I had to work with. Selective desaturation, incidentally, rarely works well in DPC challenges; the voters tend to see it as "gimmicky". I haven't seen the original, but it is possible that had you done a 75% partial desaturation this would have worked better...

Compositionally, the image is pretty good. You have your wife on the 1/3 line left, as opposed to centered int he frame, and that's excellent. The image feels a little static in the sense that it tends to break into two equal horizontal bands; if the face were not so centered vertically on the division between these bands, the composition would be a little more dynamic.

You need to be careful of those dark, smudgy shadows around the eyes. I have worked on them a bit with the dodging tool, but there wasn't a lot of value there to work with. Possibly in the original image, before all the processing, there's more detail to be brought out with careful dodging.

All in all, a nice shot, very wistful feeling to it. I encourage you to participate more.

I hope this critique was helpful to you.

Robt.