Original Image
Picture info
Camera: Nikon D60
Lens: 70-300mm lens.
Reader Varun Bhasin’s image “Faith” shows a poor man begging for alms as passers-by go about their business. It seems to me that Varun has edited the image. How do I know that? Look carefully at the area surrounding the old man. You can see a sort of glow around the man. I believe the man in the picture was underexposed due to the bright background (lit by artifi cial lights) and Varun has tried to manipulate the image to get some detail there. Since the ‘work’ has not been carried out carefully, it has left a glow around the man.
Keeping aside Varun’s overenthusiastic effort, I like the picture. The movement of people in the background, while keeping the person in the foreground reasonably sharp, is effective. The fi rst image is the original image that Varun has sent us. The second image (Edited Image 1) shows how the shot image would have been. The third image (Edited Image 2) shows how the underexposure on the man in the foreground should have been taken care of (the man was selected and lightened using Curves. The diffi cult part is the selection!). The background, lit with incandescent bulbs, is too orange and hence the orange color had to be toned down (but not completely eliminated — you need to show that the background was lit with incandescent lights).
In the absence of EXIF data that accompanies every image, I spoke to Varun over the telephone. He wasn’t too sure how the ‘glow’ could have come. All he remembered was that the image was captured using a Nikon D60 with a 70-300mm lens.
Edited Image
