where to go from here

Ann McRae · September 29, 2005

so this has been converted from RAW and that is all. Taken in the setting sunlight.
(I have been trying to get him a new 'do and glasses for ages. So over and above a makeover, ...) how would you edit this?

And I haven't gotten a decent photo of him (alone) in years.

ann

DavidTO · September 29, 2005

His face is oversaturated, but more importantly, you've got more magenta than yellow. Yellow must always be more than magenta, unless you want the skin to look burned. You can measure this in LAB or CMYK colorspaces. You don't need to convert, just set your eyedropper to show you the values in those spaces. I suggest working in LAB, if you've been following the discussion, although you could do it in any space. CMYK is destructive, so I would avoid converting it to that space.

If you don't know how to change the info panel to display LAB or CMYK values, there's a little dropper with a plus sign next to where the numbers display. That's a pull-down menu to change the measuring space.

wholenewlight · September 29, 2005

Ann McRae wrote:

how would you edit this?

And so, using techniques similar to david's, this is the quick and dirty example of what I might be looking for in this print.
1- convert to LAB
2- curves: a and b channel - reduce the steepness and adjust the slider a little to reduce magenta, increase yellow
3- lcurves: ightness channel, adjust the curve to boost the overall brightness (probably the wrong terminology).
4- Hue/Saturation: still reduced the saturation slider a little bit more
5- played around a little with a gradient layer to tone down the brightness of the background a little.

probably not perfect and maybe a little bit too washed out/bright, seems to have lost a little punch with smugmugs compression - I don't know - always critiqing myself.

Nice candid shot you created.

Ann McRae · September 30, 2005

Hi David and John

Well, I use PSP rather than PSCS, so I cannot do absolutely everything as per these tutorials.(I do not have LAB to work with). So, I first changed the color balance by sliding the yellow- blue toward yellow and the magenta - green toward green, the cyan - red toward red. Then I did a conservative curves adjustment. This is the result - it keeps the 'glow' from the setting sun, but gets rid of the excessive redness. The color of the shirt and fleece look correct. What do you think now?

Maybe too yellow, as the whites of his eyes are looking kind of jaundiced

DavidTO · September 30, 2005

You still have points that are more red/magenta than yellow. Can you measure these things in PSP? You're a lot closer, but take it a bit further, and I would still desaturate a bit more.

Ann McRae · October 1, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

You still have points that are more red/magenta than yellow. Can you measure these things in PSP? You're a lot closer, but take it a bit further, and I would still desaturate a bit more.

One more try, changed the hue value this time.Off to the hottub, so I will check back in the a.m.

ann

DavidTO · October 1, 2005

hmmm....

What happens if you go back to the previous version and instead of moving cyan/red towards red you move it towards cyan? Do you still have that version to play with? I'm not sure the hue shift works for me as well.

Ann McRae · October 1, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

hmmm....

What happens if you go back to the previous version and instead of moving cyan/red towards red you move it towards cyan? Do you still have that version to play with? I'm not sure the hue shift works for me as well.

I do and will as time allows - a team party tonight - the families of 18 11 year old boys on there way over!

I actually think I should go back to the raw file and try different white balance options.

Thanks for all the help here, David.

ann

gtc · October 1, 2005

b&w?
i sympathise-i have an ancient copy of PS -how about forget the colour and covert to black and white?

Ann McRae wrote:

I do and will as time allows - a team party tonight - the families of 18 11 year old boys on there way over!

I actually think I should go back to the raw file and try different white balance options.

Thanks for all the help here, David.

ann

Rohirrim · October 1, 2005

Hi Ann,

Since this was originally shot in RAW I would take a different approach to this image. Not that this is better than the other approaches, but possibly easier. To me the image looks too warm. Depending on which RAW converter you have I would try:

Using the Grey/White balance tool to autocorrect the white balance. This doesn't work as often as it should but its worth a shot.
Turning down the Color Temperature and the Tint. Sometimes its good to go to each extreme on these sliders and then go back until you like the effect.
Possibly turn down the saturation, but I think that once it's color corrected it should look ok.
Since your shot was taken in the morning light, I don't think I would take all the warmness out of it. Many times skin tones look good with a little "warmness" to them.

Taking the simpler approach may work with this image. As a RAW image it should be easier to color correct this in RAW. (At least I think it should

)

Regards,

David_S85 · October 1, 2005

PSP. Manual color correction>skintones. Then 18% saturation reduction. Slight crop with clone brush to remove tree in upper left corner.

DavidTO · October 1, 2005

Moved to The Digital Darkroom - Software
I moved this thread since it was really more about post-processing, and I think it'll get the proper attention in this forum.

Keep it going!

Ann McRae · October 2, 2005

Thanks everyone

Here is what I've done so far:
first, redid the RAW conversion, changing white balance and got this:

Then, thanks to david s85, I found something new with PSP that I did not know existed! So I manually changed the skin tone to caucasian, light tan, and got this:

cropped a bit and that is all. These are very true colors, both skin tone in the setting sun and the shirt and fleece colors. I will continue to play with curves and saturation but I could leave it like this and be satisfied.

Thanks! And feel free to approach this some more if you like.

ann

DavidTO · October 2, 2005

It looks great! Much improved.

I dragged it into PS to take a look at the numbers. His nose is still magenta/red. Just know that it's gonna look sunburned, and it's gonna be more noticeable in print. You could maybe change just that area slightly, so that there is less red than yellow.

edgework · October 21, 2005

I read up to 80 yellow in the lightest areas; way too much. I used a selective color layer. I pulled 9 magenta out of the reds and added 27 cyan. Added 9 cyan to yellows and pulled 67 yellow out of the yellows. Then I duped the image, converted to CMYK and stole the black plate as a layer mask for a curve, to boost the shadows. The drastic Selective color moves balanced the skin but gave it a kind of duotone feel, so I put the original on top of everything in color mode at 25% opacity.

behr655 · October 21, 2005

edgework wrote:

I read up to 80 yellow in the lightest areas; way too much. I used a selective color layer. I pulled 9 magenta out of the reds and added 27 cyan. Added 9 cyan to yellows and pulled 67 yellow out of the yellows. Then I duped the image, converted to CMYK and stole the black plate as a layer mask for a curve, to boost the shadows. The drastic Selective color moves balanced the skin but gave it a kind of duotone feel, so I put the original on top of everything in color mode at 25% opacity.

Wow! I have no idea what you're talking about but what ever you said you did sure looks great.

Bear

edgework · October 22, 2005

behr655 wrote:

Wow! I have no idea what you're talking about but what ever you said you did sure looks great.

Bear

Which parts don't you understand? I'd be glad to explain a bit more in-depth but I'm not sure this forum is the place for it. I'm new here.

Crawford Hart

behr655 · October 22, 2005

edgework wrote:

Which parts don't you understand? I'd be glad to explain a bit more in-depth but I'm not sure this forum is the place for it. I'm new here.

Crawford Hart

The parts between "I" and "opacity".

Bear

edgework · October 22, 2005

behr655 wrote:

The parts between "I" and "opacity".

Bear

Ah. That certainly narrows it down.

Even when I'm working in RGB or LAB I will take my skintone readings in CMYK. Rule of thumb: Caucasian tones should contain more or less equal magenta and yellow, with yellow favored. Cyan should be about 1/5 of those values. A decent, generic midtone reading (say cheeks or foreheads, well lit but not the brightest highlight) might have cyan at around 8-12, with magenta and yellow coming in at 45-55. In the original image, even given the sunset lighting, the near cheek is reading aroung 60M 80+Y and 1 or 2 Cyan. Hot skin always means weak or non-existent Cyan, and that's certainly the case here.

So there are two problems: Magenta and yellow are out of whack, and there's no Cyan. I prefer Selective Color to the Channel Mixer or outright plate blending because it allows a more targeted approach. It allows you to both remove tone and add tone to specific colors. My sliders were set to the numbers I mentioned, lessening the intensity of the yellows and reds, while feeding the missing cyan tones into both.

One problem that often comes up in RGB or LAB is the problem of targeting shadows without the bludgeon effect that curves in those spaces often yield; lab, in particular, with the lightness channel, will often just plug up everything and turn it to mud when you try to darken the 3/4 tones and shadows. Duplicating the file and converting it to CMYK provides a black channel, something missing from the other two spaces. I simply make a selection of that channel, inverse it and pull it back to the original RGB file and then, when I make a curve adjustment layer, the selection becomes the layer mask. Pulling the master curves now has the effect of increasing black, even though there is no black channel per se. (You could also Select all in the CMYK file, activate only the black channel, copy, return to your RGB file, create a new channel, paste, and invert. Activating this channel as a selection would give you the same result).

I put the original image on top of everything else in color mode because I wanted to help pull the tones apart but I didn't want to change the luminosity that I'd reached with the "black" move. The risk with blending channels (or using selective color) is that as you blend the tones together you always are moving away from unique hues and pushing towards a uniform sameness across the spectrum, approaching a duotone. As I pulled magenta from red, lowered the yellow content in the yellows and added cyan to both colors, they balanced out, true, but they also started to loose their unique hues. Skin doesn't have a single hue from light to dark. The original image had accurate hues, as far as the reds and yellows went, just too much of a good thing. Copying the original image to a new layer on top of everything else, at 25% opacity, in color mode, brought a bit of life back to the mix. If it no longer looks like sunset, a slight boost to the yellows would be called for.

Hope that helps.

chrisjlee · October 26, 2005

Ann McRae wrote:

Hi David and John

Well, I use PSP rather than PSCS, so I cannot do absolutely everything as per these tutorials.(I do not have LAB to work with). So, I first changed the color balance by sliding the yellow- blue toward yellow and the magenta - green toward green, the cyan - red toward red. Then I did a conservative curves adjustment. This is the result - it keeps the 'glow' from the setting sun, but gets rid of the excessive redness. The color of the shirt and fleece look correct. What do you think now?

Maybe too yellow, as the whites of his eyes are looking kind of jaundiced

You can always use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) It's opensource and free to download

BigAl · October 26, 2005

Had to have a bash at this with PSP9. I started with the first (reddish) image and followed this path:

Channel mixer: in red channel, reduced red to 60%, added 30% green and 10% blue
Color balance: -13; 6; 10
Histogram: 6; 1.00; 232
Curves: Green 194/179 64/69; Blue 195/183 64/83
Still too yellow, HSL: Yellow sat -22
HSL: Red sat -7
Clarify

Still a bit yellow...

mereimage · October 27, 2005

Ann- here's an adjustment for you.
I switched to lab- added a soft S curve to the lightness channel. Then I used the dropper to find the skin tones on the a and b curve then locked the cures near the center points and reduced the magenta and the yellow by pulling the cures away from those colors at the point where the skin tones were isolated, and added min. adj below the center pt to adjust color casts in the shadows. I then converted to RGB and used the color balance adj. to fine tune the skin tones again decreasing mag. and yellow and adding a tiny touch of red. I then used the Saturation adj to decrease the saturation. I then made a selection on the nose feathered it 5 pixels and decreased the magenta further to suit my eye. Deselcted the nose and sharpened gently with Noise Ninja. Hope you like it:

............................Mereimage

where to go from here

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