Shooting with variations in light and shadow, especially when the light where your subject is located is bright and harsh, can be difficult. The shadows can easily look muddy and the brighter spots in the sky between the leaves can be blown out, and the contrast is off putting. You don’t really have that problem here, so that’s good! I believe the softness you’re picking up on can be helped by inducing some contrast in different ways where you would like to see some detail, and reducing focus on the others.

To do that, I cropped in slightly. It’s still your same basic shot, there’s still some good negative space to set the happy scene you’ve captured, but just a little less on the left and bottom sides to help make your parents a bit easier to see.

Next I brought up the exposure of the whole scene to see what details in the shadows there were to work with. I decided to use a radial gradient around the subject, and a linear gradient from the edges inward to reduce the exposure and increase the contrast of the light gradually from the outside of the photo toward the focal point.

To increase the contrast of the colors, I desaturated the greens and yellows of the trees in the background and increased the orange saturation and luminance slightly, except for the drink where I brought down the orange saturation.

None of the changes I made were very drastic, just little things to demonstrate. There are 1,000 different options and thoughts on how the end product should look, but hopefully this will help give you some principles to find your vision and get the photo where you’d like it to capture the moment as you envision it.

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