The Blue Light Special

Andy · January 3, 2006

Attention Dgrin Photoshoppers :lol3

Photo submitted by a wedding pro, he'd like to be able to correct the colors on this in as few steps as possible.

What would you do with this image, and why? What are the fewest steps you can make to make it better? What extra steps, or other steps, would you take that you consider to be "advanced"?

Please list your steps, and screen grabs are very useful!

The original shot is located here

JamesJWeg · January 3, 2006

I am not the great at PS, so I thought this could be a cool test for me, I took his photo and made my changes, now I'll wait and see how much better and easier the good PS guys do it. I have learned 75% of what I know about PS from reading threads like this.

James.

HvnyMem · January 3, 2006

Andy wrote:

Attention Dgrin Photoshoppers

Photo submitted by a wedding pro, he'd like to be able to correct the colors on this in as few steps as possible.

What would you do with this image, and why? What are the fewest steps you can make to make it better? What extra steps, or other steps, would you take that you consider to be "advanced"?

Please list your steps, and screen grabs are very useful!

The original shot is located here

The problems with this shoot were numerous. Originally set up as outdoor and all settings were ready. Rain forced it indoor at the last minute with no time to set up my lights.

Picture was taken handheld bouncing the flash off the ceiling to avoid major blowback off the wood behind them. White balance was set to "flash" but is way off because of the bounce.

This whole wedding has been a nightmare to try to process because exposures varied based on distance to subject changing with different group sizes.

Additional problem is that when I'm done with a pic and apply the ezprints icc profile to soft proof it the profile desaturates it and makes it look muddy. Adjusting for this to get a good print makes the pic look severely oversaturated for web display.

I've used every tip from Smugmug and other sites to make sure my monitor is right. I make sure the skin tones are right by the numbers in PS.

I've gotten unadjusted test prints from several labs (all from Fuji Frontier 370 machines) and they match my soft proof output with the ezp icc applied (muddy).

Why would properly displaying pics print muddy? Why would pics that print well and look good in PS look oversaturated in all other applications including web display?

The client has payed to get the digital files so they need to both display and print properly.

Has anybody else had issues with the ezprints icc profile desaturating their output?

Andy · January 3, 2006

HvnyMem wrote:

The problems with this shoot were numerous.

Hi Ernie, welcome to Dgrin! Standby, folks will be helping I'm sure of it.

ShannonW · January 3, 2006

well, I don't consider myself an expert but I took a shot at color correcting. I cropped it first. I just used curves and then color adjusted it by subtracting a little cyan. As far as the other stuff I can't help you..Sorry and good luck!

Andy · January 3, 2006

Sometimes, you can overthink things. This is a fine image - but the white dress and white jacket have a magenta cast. Look and see what a few dead-simple adjustments can do. Of course, you can Dan Magulis or Scott Kelby this image 8 ways to Sunday - but honestly, any of the three corrections shown here are a HUGE improvement on the original, and will result in a fine print.

Ernie's Original

SmugMug's Auto Color (photo tools>color effects>auto color)

Photoshop Auto Levels

Photoshop Curves - ONLY selecting the white point with dropper (right upper portion of her bustline)

That said, let's see what the rest of the experts come up with!

jfriend · January 3, 2006

Workflow steps - color correction and other...

Andy wrote:

Attention Dgrin Photoshoppers

Photo submitted by a wedding pro, he'd like to be able to correct the colors on this in as few steps as possible.

What would you do with this image, and why? What are the fewest steps you can make to make it better? What extra steps, or other steps, would you take that you consider to be "advanced"?

Please list your steps, and screen grabs are very useful!

The original shot is located here

I am not an expert at this when things get really complicated, but this image seems to be pretty easy for color correction. It also has a bunch of other things going on in it.

The highly simplified scheme for color correction:

Find the brightest, non-blown area of the photo that should be neutral and bright white. In this photo that's the man's jacket. You can fairly easily find this point by bringing up the levels dialog (with Ctrl-L), then hold down the Alt key and drag the right triangle to the left. The first non-blown area that shows as a neutral color is the brightest spot. In this case, it's on the man's left shoulder (camera-right, person-left).
Bring up a curve adjustment layer. Click on the highlights eye-dropper (that's the right of the 3 eyedroppers). Then click on this bright spot. That will manipulate the three channels in the curves dialog to make this spot be bright white. Depending upon how you have PS configured, it will either force this spot to 255,255,255 or some lower, but neutral value. If you don't want this spot to go to 255,255,255 but rather something like 250,250,250 there is a way to configure Photoshop for that.

For this image, you can be done with color correction at this point. There are other things you'd probably want to do to this image to make it as good as it can be, but that creates a pretty good color correction. To be sure, I check the CMYK values for a few spots on the woman's skin and I find a good ratio of C,M,Y and K. Magenta is a little less than Yellow, Black is pretty low and Cyan is less than half the Magenta. She appears to be wearning some red makeup on her cheeks so you have to steer clear of those spots.

Here's what we started with:

Here's what I get after the above method of color correction. All pieces of the image that should be neutral now seem pretty close to neutral and the skin tone on the woman seems to be what it should be when looking at the CMYK values.

Now, there are many other things to look at in this photo including:

Distortion
Brightness
Shadow detail
Sharpness

Let's walk through how we'd enhance those aspects:

First, I look at the shadow detail. I make a duplicate copy of the background layer and set it to luminosity blend mode (so we will only be adjusting brightness, not color). I bring up the shadow/highlights control and adjust the shadow control a bit to bring out some detail in the lower shadows. After that adjustment, I get this:

Now, I decide that the gown and man's shirt are a little too bright. I create a curve adjustment layer (again in luminosity blend mode) and pull down just the top tones a bit. I try to keep the mid-tones as they are. That gives me this:

Now, I decide to attack the distortion in the picture. I'm after a couple of goals. The two columns on either side of the couple should be parallel to each other and to the edge of the image. The lines in the background should be parallel to sides or top so as to not look crooked. I create a duplicate layer of what we have so far (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) and use Edit/Transform/Skew to reach the above goals. I ignore a few edges that got clipped in the transformation because I know a crop is coming that will take care of that. That gives me this:

Then, I apply some smart sharpening to get this:

Then, I crop to eliminate all the dead space above and below and to even up the sides. This puts the image closer to an 8x10 ratio. Here's what it is after the crop:

And then lastly, I decide that the faces are a bit too dark. I create a curve adjustment layer in luminosity blend mode, add a curve and mask out everything except the two faces to brighten just the faces a bit. How much to do, particularly on the groom, is probably a subject of opinion. I don't want to change his features or apparent race, but with all the dark background, we need to be able to see his face too. If I were the photographer and this was an important photo in the portfolio, I'd probably prepare a couple versions to see what the couple liked on this last step. This is what I end up with:

I hope this was useful.

Andy · January 3, 2006

jfriend wrote:

I am not an expert at this when things get really complicated, but this image seems to be pretty easy for color correction. It also has a bunch of other things going on in it.
.
.
.
I hope this was useful.

Don't underestimate your skills - nice work - and YES very useful! Notice that there's not much difference between your first edit, and either of the two "quick fixes" I showed:

Nice work, John, and thanks for playing "The Blue Light Special"

OH I like the shadow recovery touch. I'd recommend a bit less though, taking it back by maybe 25% or somesuch. More on Shadow Recovery, Here on dgrin.smugmug.com

(Smug Auto, Photoshop Auto Levels, John Friend's First Edit)

DJ-S1 · January 3, 2006

That doesn't look like his final edited version?

edit: Doh! just re-read it, sorry!

Andy · January 3, 2006

Andy wrote:

Sometimes, you can overthink things. This is a fine image - but the white dress and white jacket have a magenta cast. Look and see what a few dead-simple adjustments can do. Of course, you can Dan Magulis or Scott Kelby this image 8 ways to Sunday - but honestly, any of the three corrections shown here are a HUGE improvement on the original, and will result in a fine print.

Ernie's Original

Photoshop Auto Levels

Taking the "quick fix" a bit further, using PS CS2 Shadow / Highlight Function:

Photoshop Auto Levels and then Shadow Highlight Adjustment in CS2
(18% on all sliders in Shadow and Highlight)

More here on dgrin.smugmug.com:

http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1077615
http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1077611

jfriend · January 3, 2006

Thoughts on auto-levels

Andy wrote:

Don't underestimate your skills - nice work - and YES very useful! Notice that there's not much difference between your first edit, and either of the two "quick fixes" I showed:

I am not surprised the the other two methods work equally well on this image because this image contains a perfect "white point" that should be simulateously both the brightest spot in the image and pure white. That sets things up perfectly for auto-levels to do it's job. Ohhh, if only all images were set up so easily:):.

When the brightest spot in the image is not supposed to be white, auto-levels will often really mess up. That's because it tries to stretch each channel separately from the dark point to the bright point, ending up with a result of the darkest point being black and the lightest point being white. If that's what is intended and there's no mixed lighting, it can work well. If the brightest point isn't supposed to be pure white, it messes up. Here's a link to a quick description of how auto-levels works. If most of the wedding shots are similar to this, he may just be able to run a batch process of auto-levels as a preliminary correction pass.

Andy · January 3, 2006

jfriend wrote:

I am not surprised the the other two methods work equally well on this image because this image contains a perfect "white point" that should be simulateously both the brightest spot in the image and pure white. That sets things up perfectly for auto-levels to do it's job. Ohhh, if only all images were set up so easily:):.

When the brightest spot in the image is not supposed to be white, auto-levels will often really mess up. That's because it tries to stretch each channel separately from the dark point to the bright point, ending up with a result of the darkest point being black and the lightest point being white. If that's what is intended and there's no mixed lighting, it can work well. If the brightest point isn't supposed to be pure white, it messes up. Here's a link to a quick description of how auto-levels works. If most of the wedding shots are similar to this, he may just be able to run a batch process of auto-levels as a preliminary correction pass.

You are so right, John. Auto in photoshop often misses as much as it hits. More maybe. But in this image, we see, it's ok. I'm not an Auto Levels kinda guy, but if this exercise gets some folks to try it, that's great. Then I try to get folks into the very basic curves adjustments - still in RGB mind you - and when they are comfy with that, they can start on the more advanced stuff.

Thanks for sharing!

HvnyMem · January 3, 2006

Thank you to all!

I'm using CS so a couple of tips have to be done the hard way. I'm also extremely inept at applying curves at this point

but plan on picking the brain of a top commercial photographer in town that I know.

Mr. Friend, your workflow is a bit longer but seems to address all of the main issues.

I should have joined Dgrin a long time ago!

Special thanks to Andy for his help behind the scenes. He has replied to emails at hours you'd NEVER expect and deserves major kudos!

HvnyMem · January 3, 2006

Thank you, again.

Here is what I ended up with. I added just a touch more contrast at the end. I may have gone a bit too far on the shadows and highlights and this was an easy way to bring it back a bit. I left it at 2:3 on the crop to allow them to get whatever size print they want and crop as they choose.

Andy · January 3, 2006

HvnyMem wrote:

Thank you, again.

Here is what I ended up with. I added just a touch more contrast at the end. I may have gone a bit too far on the shadows and highlights and this was an easy way to bring it back a bit. I left it at 2:3 on the crop to allow them to get whatever size print they want and crop as they choose.

Nice work, Ernie

I agree, go a little more lightly on the shadow recovery - your prints will thank you for it

jfriend · January 3, 2006

Looks great

HvnyMem wrote:

Thank you, again.

Here is what I ended up with. I added just a touch more contrast at the end. I may have gone a bit too far on the shadows and highlights and this was an easy way to bring it back a bit. I left it at 2:3 on the crop to allow them to get whatever size print they want and crop as they choose.

Looks great!

zigzag · January 4, 2006

HvnyMem wrote:

Why would properly displaying pics print muddy? Why would pics that print well and look good in PS look oversaturated in all other applications including web display?

The client has payed to get the digital files so they need to both display and print properly.

Has anybody else had issues with the ezprints icc profile desaturating their output?

I'm sure with my limited experience that I can't do better than the folks who corrected the pic here. But I can take a stab at these questions. The color spaces must be different between sRGB web display and the ezprints icc profile. The ezprints gamut must be smaller, meaning that the colors get compressed as the space gets converted.

How to solve it though? I dunno. I'm still a beginner at color management. But there are color wiz folks here at dgrin who can probably go into much more depth on this. Hopefully they see this and weigh in.

HvnyMem · January 4, 2006

You are the first to address this!
Thank you for bringing this up.

I think your assessmentis probably close. It's not just the EZP icc profile. It occurs across the spectrum of every Fuji Frontier printer I've gotten prints from. The icc profile is just EZPrint's way of trying to let you see what the output will be.

But according to Smugmug's tips pages, the printers recognize sRGB and will compress and wash out a file in Adobe98.

The question is:

Why does it desaturate a file that is right "by the numbers" in PS and taken, processed, and printed in sRGB?

chrisjlee · January 6, 2006

Well, I really enjoyed this post.

The Blue Light Special

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