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grey skin

Oh selective coloring, you never cease to amaze us with you horribleness!

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18 Comments

  1. Oh Wow!! That could have been a nice photo.

  2. Oh Wow! That could have been a nice photo.

  3. I like her highlights.

  4. I agree, this COULD have been a great portrait. Then someone had to throw selective color at it in the wrong place. Either this person REALLY loved her hair and asked the photographer to hilight her hair and make it stand out or… This was just poorly processed.

  5. Now that could have been a nice photo, damn you!

  6. High Horsie

    It probably was a nice photo. I’ll bet someone else decided to spot color the hair. Sort of like when your client mutilates your photos and posts them to Facebook.

    • Nope, this was done by the tog. He is a local close to me. He does this spot color crap all the time.

  7. Why?
    Also is rather too tightly cropped, why miss off half her head? And the fingertips? Just No.

    • I have to agree. Even in BW or colour, this is a fail. A few fingertips popping in from the edge is just wrong. I could almost forgive the head cut but appendages are a peeve with me. All in all, another shining example of why good gear does not a photographer make these days. If you don’t know how to process well, then every capture will suck.

      • High Horsie

        Wow. Meggy and Bob, I challenge either of you to show your work. I will bet it’s far worse than this “fail.”

        I’ll concede the misplaced fingertips, but the slight cut-off head crop is very popular in portraiture today. It is not a mistake by any means…

        And if there’s any question, go look at the work of Peter Hurley – you know, one of the most sought after photographers in the country.

        Keep doing your thing though. I’m sure your Facebook page is already up to 20 “likes”.

  8. I popped this in Photoshop, desaturated the image, and it looks nice. As a black and white it could pass for a quality pro photo. I imagine the same could be said for color. But this compromise between the two just goes to prove that all compromising ever does is ruin something great.

    • with pinlights in the eyes instead of nice big catchlights i would have to disagree on a “quality pro photo”….sorry, a nice ok beginner shot yes…quality pro photo…NO

      • I’m not saying it’s perfect, just that it’s a nice photo. I mean truly, it’s not horrible. Focus is good. Composition is acceptable. It’s not an award winning shot or something you’d use in a magazine, but I do believe the average person would be willing to pay for this level quality. At least if it would make up its mind on coloring. At least there’s some light in her eyes and she doesn’t look dead. How many fauxs would have done an outside shot with “natural light only” and left her eyes looking dead as a corpse?

        Sure, it’s important to strive for being the best we can be, but you’ve got to give a little grace. No photographer in history has made a perfect exposure every time.

  9. This one is from one of our locals. It’s the same one that did the baby with flowers layered onto a baby belly shot that was on the front page a few weeks back. Very few of his shots are acceptable. He does this spot color train wreck on a lot of his images.

  10. It’s a shame. The model has a pretty face and nice smile. The tilted head and arranging of her hair could have been a good portrait, but the crop is really subpar and the image could have benefited from an off-camera light source to give her eyes a twinkle and her lips a more appealing sheen.

    . But what I don’t get is how anybody can do spot colour so …spottily. If it was a case of feathering the edges, that ‘might’ be one thing, but no…somebody just totally missed spots.

  11. What a way to ruin a potentially great shot.

  12. QuicksilverQueen

    Oh god…selective coloring…SO dated, and SO ugly. HATE hate hate it.

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