SD photography tips

I don't understand. Why would you "lose detail" by cropping out empty space? The number of pixels on the subject wouldn't change.

If you mean that when the dolls are standing, there's too much space on either side of them, change the pose to be more square-ish (kneel, recline, sit, group, extend limbs, etc.), alter the angle (tilt so the body line points into the corners), fill the gaps with scenery/sets/props, or wear more "poofy" outfits that simply take up more space sideways.

Or just accept that some limbs will be excluded from the final product. Most portraits are not full body shots. Is it really necessary to "capture it all"?

 

I've read and re-read the original post now and I don't get what the problem is, particularly with reference to the size also. Care to describe it differently? What works, what isn't working? How about some actual photo examples of good and bad?

 

Okay, now that I've slept on it a bit, I think what you are seeing are JPEG compression artifacts. I won't know for sure without seeing an example, but I'm guessing that you are working from a JPEG and saving to another JPEG. I suspect that the process was not "clean", meaning that Photoshop is applying compression again on the image, which would ugly it up pretty good. Here is a list of applications that can do lossless operations on JPEG (which won't affect quality), but I will say up front that I have not used these personally.

If you do lots of Photoshop, I would suggest working from TIFF or PNG files when possible.

EDIT: I think you can get Photoshop to do a lossless operation by setting no compression/best quality when saving. Problem is I only have Elements 7 and it is not in front of me so I can't necessarily help you identify the setting on your screen.

 

When you open the crop tool in photoshop, the top bar changes to a crop-specific options thing. Are there any numbers entered into the boxes there? If so, it'd be resizing and cropping at the same time, which would explain the quality loss.

 

Shoot to RAW. If you're using photoshop anyway, there's no reason not to except for the hard drive and card space, and that's cheap enough these days to be worth the investment.

 

What your problem is is getting the whole doll (or as much of the body as you want) into the shot, right? Because larger dolls are proportionally taller than your tiny.

I'd also like to know the answer to this. 'How can you get a nice photo of a full body shot (to show clothes, for example)?' (And without using an angle which gives EXTREME foreshortening.)

 

Do you mean something like this? I didn't crop any of these.







Unless you crop, all the background is empty (unless there is a backdrop of some sort).

This is Volks photo. I believe this is not cropped either. It is empty behind him versus mine with background.



If you crop it will take away less of the empty spaces behind him.

I always shoot in raw now, edit in DPP (my poor photoshop 7 doesn't open raw). After I convert them into jpeg, then I do a bit more editing in PS.

I forgot to mention that also use a photo uploading service that doesn't compress the quality of your photos. Photobucket used to do a lot of it in secrecy (people do not know it unless they right click on the photo after it has been uploaded to see the size of the photo has been compressed by at least 50%. The dimension is still the same so many people did not notice. They do this even for PAID members which outraged me so I don't use PB anymore (except for sale photos). I use zenfolio for a little over a year now and I like it lots.

PB hasn't been compressing as heavily as before now I noticed but still compresses a little bit. So I still don't use them for photoshoots. ^^