I could use some help with these images

DMPhotography

I attended a good friend of mines wedding almost a year ago. I wanted to make some prints for them for their 1 r anniversary. Unfortunately the External HD I had them on has been destroyed. The only images I have are my deletes from the series. So hopefully with your help I can make these into decent looking printable images for Zed.

There are also a couple concert pictures I took, if you Photoshop gods can help me out with those

You can see them at http://damphotography.smugmug.com
or PM me and I will email you the raw images.

Here are a couple images:

Andy

Derek, post a link to the raws for these posted images, for download. Try http://getdropbox.com it's free.

DMPhotography

Thanks Andy,
I created an account there. Post or PM me your email and I can share the folder with you.

Andy

Derek - I and the community want to help. Post a link to the raw files from these posted images - so that folks can help.

chuckinsocal

Here's my attempt from the image posted. It probably sucks but I just wanted to compare it to what others with far more talent than I would do. It's just a learning experience for me.



My primary goals were to take the glare out of the sky, to bring out the skin tones, and bring out some details in the dresses. I tried to accomplish this with Shadows/Highlights, a touch of exposure, some LAB curves, then some curves specifically on the skin tones and other areas I wanted to bring out. I tried to bring some colors out of the bouquets, but just couldn't get it right. I basically fiddled with it until thought it looked ok. I also cropped it some.

I look forward to comments and to seeing what others do.

Thanks.

Andy

DMPhotography wrote:

I thought I had some up there. Here are some more.

Try again - just post the link to the RAW files from your dropbox account

NOT https links.

DMPhotography

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/5372932/1/Pictures%20to%20be%20edited?h=8e3bfd

Thanks Andy. Can you edit your post to delete the huge files.

Thanks again! Can't wait to see what you guys can do.

Andy

Put 3 raws in your public folder. Go to that folder and click the down arrow and copy the link to the raws. Then paste here.

ziggy53

Derek, what we are looking for is the original Nikon NEF files from your D300. Did you shoot to JPG files or to NEF files?

DMPhotography

Thanks Andy, Ive never used dropbox before, obviously ha.

ziggy53- I don't have the files anymore. Only these jpegs:puke1

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9219.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9233.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9243.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9249.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9266.jpg

DMPhotography

Some more:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9282.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9288.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9316.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9328.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9349.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9358.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9522.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9723.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9722.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9681.JPG

Andy

DMPhotography wrote:

Thanks Andy, Ive never used dropbox before, obviously ha.

ziggy53- I don't have the files anymore. Only these jpegs:puke1

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9219.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9233.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9243.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9249.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5372932/DSC_9266.jpg

Ugh. In our PMs I asked if you had RAW files - you said yes... JPGs could just have been made available on SmugMug for download, thus avoiding the whole need for Dropbox

DMPhotography

Sorry, I thought I did. But I lost everything on my HD..

Svennie

DMPhotography wrote:

Sorry, I thought I did. But I lost everything on my HD..

Damn!

I took one for a fast edit in The Gimp (no photoshop on my linux box still ) and gave the others a quick stare. I think most of them can be used for prints. 9522 for example is just a little dark, that's all. If you like the example, I can process the rest in photoshop for you. Just rotated and cropped the image. It still needs some color correction, I think.

ziggy53

I hate to ask, but is this a paying venture? (The reprocessing and recovery of these images.)

DMPhotography

ziggy53 wrote:

I hate to ask, but is this a paying venture? (The reprocessing and recovery of these images.)

It can be. I'm not charging them for it, as they are not clients. They are friends of mine and I think it would be a very cool gift for them. If you would want to do a quote for me, I will consider it.

ziggy53

DMPhotography wrote:

It can be. I'm not charging them for it, as they are not clients. They are friends of mine and I think it would be a very cool gift for them. If you would want to do a quote for me, I will consider it.

Would you care to turn this into a learning opportunity? Do you have a recent version of Photoshop?

Svennie

I gave it a go:
DMPhotography

The white balance is off and they have a lot of blown out areas. That makes it pretty complicated . I'm not completely satisfied with the result yet, however, I think these work best in black&white:


The rest will follow soon

DMPhotography

ziggy53 wrote:

Would you care to turn this into a learning opportunity? Do you have a recent version of Photoshop?

Most definitely. I have access to a computer with CS4 so I can get on it every once in awhile.

DMPhotography

Svennie wrote:

I gave it a go:
DMPhotography

The white balance is off and they have a lot of blown out areas. That makes it pretty complicated . I'm not completely satisfied with the result yet, however, I think these work best in black&white:


The rest will follow soon

thanks! I wish I had the raw files still to take care of this.

Svennie

I think for some photos I'm still not skilled enough... They are all in the gallery now. It was a nice exercise
Feel free to comment on the result, as it mostly a learning experience for me as well

ziggy53

OK, I'd like to start with this image:



... and create this result:

---

First the original image is imported into Photoshop (PS) using ACR and the following settings (settings not mentioned are "0"):

Brightness -90
Contrast -40
Clarity +33
Vibrance +18

A touch of sharpening and the following Curve:



Output to PS in 16 bit and this yields:



In PS I use a purchased plugin called iCorrect Portrait to adjust overall black point and get the skin tones back to fairly normal. This yields:



Note that you can use any technique to revert the flesh tones to normal/typical values, including the SmugMug tutorial:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone

I'll break this up into sections but hopefully you can see that the bride's skin color is getting back to usable ranges in tone.

DMPhotography

Svennie wrote:

I think for some photos I'm still not skilled enough... They are all in the gallery now. It was a nice exercise
Feel free to comment on the result, as it mostly a learning experience for me as well

Thank you very much, You gave me some great ideas for some of them. Again great job!

DMPhotography

ziggy53-

wow you made it look incredible. Thanks for the tip as well. This is becoming a very good learning expirence. Do you think the image would be ok to print though? I look forward to your next posts. This has been a great learning exp.

Thanks again to everyone whom has contributed thus far

ziggy53

DMPhotography wrote:

ziggy53-

wow you made it look incredible. Thanks for the tip as well. This is becoming a very good learning expirence. Do you think the image would be ok to print though? I look forward to your next posts. This has been a great learning exp.

Thanks again to everyone whom has contributed thus far

That's the goal, to be able to print the image. It will never be perfect because too much information was lost through improper exposure and JPG processing, but I think you can make a usable print.

The reason I wanted to start with this image is because I love the bride's smile and pose. This should not be lost if at all possible and is worthy of sharing.

If nothing else, this is a rather extreme case and many of the other images will seem easy using similar treatments to a lesser extent.

I'm not the best we have either. Maybe one of the others will jump in too.

DMPhotography

ziggy53 wrote:

That's the goal, to be able to print the image. It will never be perfect because too much information was lost through improper exposure and JPG processing, but I think you can make a usable print.

The reason I wanted to start with this image is because I love the bride's smile and pose. This should not be lost if at all possible and is worthy of sharing.

If nothing else, this is a rather extreme case and many of the other images will seem easy using similar treatments to a lesser extent.

I'm not the best we have either. Maybe one of the others will jump in too.

Great! That is the ultimate goal to be able to get these printed for them. You did an excellent job. Hopefully we will get some others to chime in as well.

ziggy53

Since the background and tree can use some work I'll apply a quick method for deepening those tones.

Make a copy of the entire image and apply a "Multiply" blending to the overlay layer. This will dramatically increase the density of all tones.

Make sure you are adjusting the top layer and choose the Image-Adjustments-Color Balance. Feel free to tweak this to whatever looks natural-ish for the background and tree. Use your memory of the scene as it was along with your vision of what it should be. Don't worry about the flesh tones as they will change too, but we'll take care of that next.



Now choose the "Eraser" tool and choose a soft-edged brush. Remember you can vary the size of the brush with the "[" "]" keys of the keyboard. Choose an Opacity and Flow that suites your wishes and remove the top-most layer of skin tones, exposing the skin tones that were balanced before.



I recommend leaving at least a "hint" of the top image to provide a slight border and feather of the skin tones.

When you finish it should look like:

ziggy53

If you are fairly satisfied with the skin tones and background/surroundings, flatten the image back to a single layer.

Use the Lasso tool to quickly draw around the bride's dress. Then use the Select-Color Range to select the entire dress, the whites of the dress. Use the Shift key to allow a continuous selection. Don't worry too much about getting it perfect but do the best you can.

After you approve your color range selection, you'll have a crawly marquee line around most of the bride's dress. Choose the "Quick Mask" mode and then a combination of paint brush and eraser (hard brushes) to build a mask of the dress, just the dress. When you finish, switch back to Standard mode. You should now have the entire dress selected.

You might have noticed that parts of the dress have picked up some colors from the surroundings, a type of "color poisoning" of the dress.

To neutralize the color choose "Image-Adjustments-Hue Saturation" and globally pull down the saturation most of the way. Also bump up the Lightness a little. The wedding gown should now be a very pure white. De-select the dress.



While we're here, let's fix a little of the burned-out skin tones. You can use the Clone tool for this job.





There are more areas that could use the treatment, so feel free to take the process as far as you like.

ziggy53

Now let's replace most of the wedding gown that was blown-out to pure white with no detail. If you select the dress in your shot #DSC_9266.jpg, clip it to a new layer, bring just that layer over to the image that we're working on, then use Levels and whatnot to massage the tones into something similar to the visible wedding gown, we can use that to replace the missing parts.

We'll need 2 copies, rotated and overlapping, to fill in the required space. Then it's a matter of creating a mask to use to clip out the required portions.

Here are the 2 copies of the #DSC_9266.jpg dress components, rotated and overlapping (one copy was also flipped prior to importing):



After building a mask and clipping and adjusting tones:



And overlayed:



Now match the different gown tones to get as close a match as possible and flatten the image.

ziggy53

Finally, blend the parts of the gown together using the Clone tool until it makes as much sense as possible. Create a duplicate layer and select the area of the veil and delete that area.



At this point you need to locate a veil image to replace the missing piece. Unfortunately I can't show you what I used in the demonstration image way above because it is used without permission and only to demonstrate the concept. That's why it is only hinted at in that image.

To be proper I would have to acquire at least written permission from the owner of the image. (It's a matketing/promotional image so it might be possible.) Ultimately it would be better to just shoot a veil to use as a replacement image.

You could clone in some background behind the veil from existing background material and use transparency to simulate the transparency of the actual veil material.

*

Flatten everything and reduce to 8 bit ... and there you have it. a close facsimile to what your camera might have recorded at the time.

*P.S. I almost forgot, I selected the skin tones and created a separate layer, then went back to the background layer and sharpened fairly aggressively (but not touching the skin tones layer).

ziggy53

Another image I tackled was this one:



I extended the sky, removed the tree branches, brightened and sharpened, and replaced the bouquet with a more complete version from the other similar image (but I like this image better overall.) Finally I re-cropped to the original aspect ratio, removing some of the ground which was unneeded. The flesh tones might need a little more work.