Photography Snow Pics and Editing Woes

I wish I had some advice to give. Unfortunately I'm not that experienced with photography. However, I love the pictures just as they are, and I love your doll and the outfit. The snowflakes in her hair are a lovely part of the photos. Personally I wouldn't change a thing!

 

They're pretty poses, but they are kind of faded out. I think before you start trying to get the dreamy look you want, you should work to make the original picture a bit more workable. There's only so much you can do, otherwise. Try this in photoshop:

Image Adjust Autocolor to brighten up the whites
Filters - Diffuse Glow. Reduce the graininess to 0. Lower the glow amount to 1. I liked clear 17, but you may like something else.
Image Adjust Color Balance - Push red up to about 20


That will give you a nice, clear picture to work with from here. I think you were not having success at what you were doing because the colors were not well balanced in the original pics.

From here, you can save and then try various photo filters... or even see if you can put the face on it's own layer. Doing a diffuse glow on just the face now may produce what you want. Think of the way they always showed Kirk's love interests in the old Star Trek series.

 

Your pictures are cute!
In my opinion the edited version is cute too, but it looks a lil too gray for a dream kinda effect, maybe? I think dreamy effects are achived with brighter colors and sometimes blur? ^^

 

assuming you are using photoshop I would try going to adjutments-levels then clicking on the little dropper for your darkest colour and find the darkest colour in your picture. Then depending on how that works out maybe up your contrast a bit then fiddle with your brightness. After that go to adjustments-colour ballance and pump up the magenta/red/blue, just fiddle with them until they look right. Don't be afraid to take your time :p it also might be worth it to emphasise the face with the dodge tool. Overall your pictures are really pretty keep up the good work.

 

Nice photos straight from the camera! May I first commend you on how you have taken great photos to start off with? I really like how the snowflakes look on her wig.

Hope you don't mind that I've edited your photo, to explain what I've done. Here's what I edited:



I'm not sure if the way I interpreted dreamy is the same as yours, but what I did was to google "dreamy snow photo" and see what kind of colours they have.
With so much white in your original photo, I thought going less saturated with colours with tones of blue like those photos I see on google might give the effect.

Your original photo was a bit dark, especially the contrast of the robe against the snow, so using levels, curves, brightness and contrast (a mix of all these steps), I basically lightened the midtones of the photo and brightened up the highlights. I was also trying to not overbrighten so I don't lose the shadows of the robe's fur lining and at the part near her hand in the bottom right of the photo, because that would make the photo appear very flat when I lighten up the midtones.

After that, I added in layers of colour to filter the photo, you can see the different effects and colours I've used below (most of them are set at low opacity and fill). The colours are chosen from observing the predominate colours of highlight, midtones and shadows in the reference images I got from googling before. So a light cyan blue on darker shades, a bit of a off white (light yellow) for highlights, and a tad of purple tone as transition (hardly noticeable but makes a difference). And as a last step I just did adjustments on the contrast again to make sure the colour filters don't wash the photo out.

Then as a bonus, I duplicated the original photo (after editing contrast) and added "Field blur", which I then set to about 70% opacity and used an eraser to erase out the parts I want sharp (I erased most of the blurred layer, leaving only the edges of the photo blurry).



I hope that was what you have in mind, and if not, I hope what I described above was still helpful to you in some way!


Ah yes, and I would like to add that I think your original edit might have been too saturated in terms of colour and a bit on the dark side, which is why it might be a bit "heavy" and doesn't really have the "dreamy" look?

 

Very lovely photo, but i think more blue and green in the edit version will be better, that will make the snow more cool/pale?
If you don't want the whole pic become cool, you can just adjust the white color, the doll can be remain in warm color.