Adding natural sunlight

[Jessica Forster]

Hi All

I'm and expanding photoshop skills,

1. Opinions on my first attempt of adding a natrual backlight?

2. I have selected the people and inverted to add the gradient to the back ground, my problem is if you zoom on the girls hair it's not a very clean edge around it, any advice on a way to make this look cleaner and more professionall?

Thanks

 

[ancient_mariner]

This was against the same background as in your previous thread. What did you want to change about the background (which looked fine before)?

This looks more like the subjects are posed in front of an artificial background because it doesn't match the lighting on their skin.

 

[PhilH04]

Not working for me... not quite sure how you can add 'natural sunlight'.

Are you trying to make the image look like it was shot against the light? If so it is better to do it naturally rather than try to emulate, use a reflector to add front lighting.

As this image stands with the work you have done the foreground maybe needs more warmth and the 'flare' needs to be more overall...

 

[Jessica Forster]

This was against the same background as in your previous thread. What did you want to change about the background (which looked fine before)?

This looks more like the subjects are posed in front of an artificial background because it doesn't match the lighting on their skin.

Completely understandable what your saying, in this image the sun had gone behind a cloud giving a dull background, I am just playing around in photoshop to expand my skills and watching YouTube tutorials. I came across ones adding a 'natrual sunlight' effect to portraits but it's just not working for me.

 

[Jessica Forster]

Not working for me... not quite sure how you can add 'natural sunlight'.

Are you trying to make the image look like it was shot against the light? If so it is better to do it naturally rather than try to emulate, use a reflector to add front lighting.

As this image stands with the work you have done the foreground maybe needs more warmth and the 'flare' needs to be more overall...

I was watching YouTube tutorials to play around and expand photoshop experience. I came across tutorials on adding 'natrual sunlight' to portraits and gave it ago and aimed for a similar effect.

 

[Phil V]

My FB feed is full of portraits that started as average and that have been ruined by people using photoshop to improve those images and making them look ridiculous.
Your ‘improvement’ has improved nothing and added issues that weren’t there originally, you’ve not got to the point of ridiculous, please pause to think before you do.

Now, you can carry on trying to perfect your photoshop skills in the vain hope you’ll one day learn to polish a turd, or you can put the same effort into improving your photography skills so you don’t need to spend the hours in photoshop.

Just for you to contemplate...
Fundamentally to ‘photograph’ is to capture the light reflected from a subject. We don’t take pictures of objects, we capture the light reflected from them.

So, the single most difficult thing to do convincingly in post is to significantly alter lighting.

 

[juggler]

What @Phil V said...

Plus, it's really hard to modify the foreground and background of a single image in radically different ways and have the results look plausible - and even harder to do it with a single mask.

It's probably easier to replace the backgrounds completely. I do that sometimes, but I tend to plan for it - and shoot against a background which is similar in tone and lighting to the one I'm dropping in.
fwiw I'm not happy with the results of any of my replacement backgrounds where I didn't plan for it and I've been working on that kind of thing a fair bit lately.

If you can post the original then I'm sure you'll be overwhelmed with suggestions.