Danielle From Yesterday!

imax

A Pleasure to work with.




The rest can be seen here

http://imax.smugmug.com/Portfolio

Thanks for looking

Happy Holidays


Joe

GraphyFotoz

Holy Cow!!!
Very nice Imax!!

She looks as good walking twards ya as she does walking away!

kdog

GREAT job. Finally, some nice sharp eyes.

I love the train-tracks shot.

gus

Beautifull Nicely done.

david_h

GraphyFotoz wrote:

Very nice Imax!!

She looks as good walking twards ya as she does walking away!

I think she looks better walking away :

Andy

Imax - yes - good work - watch the teethwhitening - way overdone imo. Dial that back 25-50% and they'll be perfect.

DavidTO

Hey, did you do any post processing on the teeth? Or were they exposed that way? If you did, methinks it's a touch much...

jfriend

imax wrote:

A Pleasure to work with.




The rest can be seen here
http://imax.smugmug.com/Portfolio

I love the pose and she's a beautiful subject. You could really make this awesome with some post processing. Some things I'd consider:

• The image seems a little too bright overall
• I'm not sure the skin color is quite right (If you look at the CMYK values, it appears to have a bit too much Magenta and not enough Cyan). Some values even have more Magenta than Yellow which is usually a no-no (will print too red).
• There's a little shine in a few places on the face and nose.
• A realistic amount of skin smoothing would be great. You are so close and have so much detail that you may want to soften it some in the skin
• The teeth are a bit overdone (either in post processing or in exposure)
• Try for some sharpening of the eyes.

leebase

Nice framing. I agree the teeth are overdone. I think the exposure would be better backed back half a stop or so as well. Still, good work.

Lee

imax

As for the teeth, I'll have to talk to her dentist. Purely hers. Thanks for the opinions though, I really appreciate them. Hopefully I'll get the opportunity to work with her again.

Joe B

DavidTO

imax wrote:

As for the teeth, I'll have to talk to her dentist. Purely hers.

Joe B

Well, dirty 'em up a bit!

Serriously, the teeth are then most likely overexposed.

jfriend

How about this?

jfriend wrote:

I love the pose and she's a beautiful subject. You could really make this awesome with some post processing. Some things I'd consider:

• The image seems a little too bright overall
• I'm not sure the skin color is quite right (If you look at the CMYK values, it appears to have a bit too much Magenta and not enough Cyan). Some values even have more Magenta than Yellow which is usually a no-no (will print too red).
• There's a little shine in a few places on the face and nose.
• A realistic amount of skin smoothing would be great. You are so close and have so much detail that you may want to soften it some in the skin
• The teeth are a bit overdone (either in post processing or in exposure)
• Try for some sharpening of the eyes.

I hope you don't mind. I followed my own advice and came up with this:
My retouch on the left, original on the right.
Very beautiful subject.

imax

jfriend wrote:

I hope you don't mind. I followed my own advice and came up with this:
My retouch on the left, original on the right.
Very beautiful subject.


I agree, now I need to know how you did that, mind sharing?

illuminati919

I really like the way you framed the subject. Her skin is definitely exposed a little to much, I believe that her skin tone still needs a warm feeling because she has an exotic look to her, I think her teeth need a slight adjustmen, but should still be kept as white as possible. I did a little processing my self to show you what i came up with, hope u dont mind.

jfriend

Step-by-step with pictures

imax wrote:

I agree, now I need to know how you did that, mind sharing?

Here's the outline of the steps I used with step-by-step detail below:

• Duplicate background to a new layer.
• Apply a small amount of shadow/highlights (shadow setting only to recover some detail in the hair and eyes)
• Remove shine from the face by painting on a new layer in darken mode
• Use spot healing brush to remove obvious skin blemishes
• Use curve in luminosity blend mode to make it not so bright
• Use masked surface blur to remove detail from the skin. I applied some blur in lighten mode and some in darken mode.
• Mask off blur from eyes, mouth and hair
• Apply curve and mask to drastically lower brightness of the teeth to restore detail and partially lower brightness of the lips
• Color correct to get better balance between the different channesl in CMYK (a little more Cyan and little less Magenta) with an RGB curve.
• Final tweak on overall brightness and add some contrast with a slight S curve in luminosity blend mode (the color correction changed the brightness some and I wanted a little more facial and hair contrast)
• Sharpen first with High radius low amount USM to enhance contrast
• Sharpen finally with smart sharpen

Here's the step-by-step detail:

This is what we started with:


The first thing I decide to do is to use shadow highlights to restore a little more detail in the hair and eyes. I don't remember my exact settings, but it was a moderate amount (probably an amount of about 15-20 with a tonal width of 50 and radius of 30). That gives me this:


Now I want to reduce the skin shine. A technique I've used that works well is to create a new blank layer and set it to darken blend mode. Then, find an area of skin shine like her left cheek. Use the eyedropper to sample a good skin color from as close to that shiny area as you can get without sampling the shine itself. Then paint on the empty layer with a soft brush set to 60% opacity over the shiny area. Don't paint any further out than you need to because you will lose detail wherever you paint. If one pass with the brush isn't enough to remove the shine, use a second pass with the brush. Do all the other areas of shine in the same manner. If any of your brush strokes are visible, then you may not have sampled a color that's close enough to the color it should be so try sampling a little different color. The darken blend mode allows us to remove the highlights of the shine (replacing it with a locally sampled color, but keep the darker parts of the texture so the skin doesn't go completely flat). Because you are in darken blend mode, you don't have to be real careful about painting over dark things. For example, there is a bunch of shine above her left eye (viewer right) and I just painted right over the eyebrows. Because the eyebrows are darker than the sampled color, they are not affected.

When I'm all done with the painting, I sometimes back off the opacity on the empty layer. First of all, human nature seems to be to overdo the correction a bit so backing off on the opacity addresses than tendency. Second, sometimes you want to restore just a tiny bit of the light reflection to add a bit of depth. In this case, I did not back off on the opacity as I didn't think I needed it, but I usually do. Here's what we have with the skin shine removed:


How I'm going to attack skin irregularities. I absolutely love the spot healing brush for this. To prepare for that, I make a merged copy of the image so far into a new layer. I then set a hard-edged brush that's just a little larger than the defects I'm trying to fix. I just click on each defect and carefully examine the effect. If it isn't perfect or the fix is visible at all, hit undo and redo it. For skin, the spot healing brush is nearly always perfect except when it's really close to some non-skin element (hair, eyes, etc...). I concentrate mostly on the irregularities on the left side of her face (viewer right), but also a few on her nose and chin. That gives me this:

Now, I want to address the overall brightness. For that, I create a curves adjustment layer and set the blend mode to luminosity. The luminosity blend mode will allow us to change the brightness without affecting the color. Knowing that the brightest part of the image is the teeth and they are also too bright, I pull the right edge of the curve down and then pull the mid-tones down a tad more with this curve:

To get this image:


Now lets smooth the skin some. To do this, I'm going to use surface blur and I'm going to blend one layer in lighten mode and one in darken mode. I'll want the whole thing to be in a configuration that I can adjust the opacity to taste. To do this, I first create a merged copy of the whole image into a new layer. I then experiment with surface blur on this separate layer. I'm sorry but I don't remember my exact settings. On this layer, it's OK to overdo the blur just a little bit because we're going to dial it back in two ways. When I get a blur I think I like, I dup that layer. Now I've got two blurred layers. I set one to darken mode and one to lighten mode. What this will do is the first layer will blur the darker parts of the image (lightening them) and the second layer will blur the lighter parts of the image (darkening them), but we'll still retain some sense of texture and avoid the barbie look.

Now I want to be able to adjust the overall effect to dial it back a little and keep it realistic looking. To do that I create a curve adjustment layer and don't change the curve at all (it could be any adjustment layer actually) below the two blurred layers. I then group the two blurred layers above it like this:


What we've done in essence is to create a master controller for the two blur layers. With this master controller, we can adjust the overall opacity of the effect in one place and we can also apply a mask for the overall effect. I dial back the opacity of the effect to 68%. How much to dial it back depends upon how much you blurred it.

Now, I make a rough mask to make sure none of the blur is being applied to the hair eyes or mouth. Since we used surface blur in the first place, those elements weren't blurred much anyway, but it's easy to make this mask so I do it. Here's what the mask looks like:


That gives us this image after the skin blur:


Now, I want to fix the teeth as they are just too bright. To do this, I create a curve adjustment layer and set it to luminosity mode. I fill the mask with black and with a soft white brush I paint over the teeth and lips. This mask is sloppy at this point - I'll fix it in a minute. Now I play with the RGB curve to bring the brightness of the teeth down to where we can see more detail in them and they don't overpower the image. I end up with this curve (a pretty big move):

When I get the teeth brightness how I want them, I then refine the mask. I switch my brush to a soft black brush and paint over the lips so that only the teeth are exposed to the curve. When that is how I want it, I then switch to a 20% opacity soft white brush and I paint over the lips to bring them down in brightness just a little bit. Repeat to taste. Making the lips a bit darker removes some shine from them and adds the perception of color. I end up with this mask:


That gives us this image (note the increased detail in the teeth, enhanced color in the lips and how they aren't overpowering anymore):


Now I want to attack the skin color. I probably should have done this earlier in the workflow, but I just forgot about it until now. As I said earlier, the numbers tell us that the skin color might have a little too much magenta and not quite enough cyan. It's not far off, but might end up printing a little too red if we left it the way it was. Let's see how it looks with a little correction.

First, I create four color samplers (forehead, each cheek and chin). I try not to put the samplers where I painted out the shine - try to pick a natural color spot. On all four color samplers I see numbers like C=5%, M=31%, Y=32%, K=0%. There's even one point where the Magenta is more than the Yellow which is a no-no. So, I create a new curve adjustment layer. I go to the red channel and pull down the right end of the curve a little to increase the cyan a bit. We're trying to get the cyan to about half the magenta value, but I don't want to go too far. I end up with this red curve:


Now, I go to the green curve. I know that I can raise the yellow and reduce the magenta with the green curve. I'm trying to get to a point where the magenta is about 30% less than the yellow. I do that with this curve:


Now, I step back and look at things and decide that, while the skin numbers look good now, I don't want to go quite that far so I dial back the opacity in that curve adjustment layer to 64%. I've now got this image after the color correction:


At this point, I decide that some of the skin looks a little flat and I wonder if some added contrast will look nice. I bring up a curve adjustment layer and dial in a subtle S-curve like this:


That gives me tihs image with just a little more skin contrast:



Now it's time to sharpen. I use two types of sharpening. HIRALOAM (high radius low amount) is used to boost local contrast. I won't describe this technique in detail (I'm still learning it), but I did USM at A=29, R=33, T=4 to add some depth to the facial features and some pop to the eyes and hair. Then finally I did a shart sharpen with A=200, R=0.2. I check to see if there's any undesired sharpening in the skin. If so, I'd mask it off here, but on this one we've blurred enough that we're OK.

That leads to this final comparison of after (on the left) and before (on the right):


Hope this was helpful.

kdog

That's impressive work.

FatNakedGuy

Very nice backend work. Are there any books you would recommend on this subject?

Thanks!

jfriend

Recommended post processing books

FatNakedGuy wrote:

re there any books you would recommend on this subject?

Books, hmmm - I have 16 different Photoshop books and 12 different photography books. I'm probably due to write a short summary of all of them to provide some general info for everyone. But a short summary of my current favorites will have to do for now.

Warning, this is a not a beginning reading list for Photoshop. This assumes you are already familiar with most of the PS tools, with adjustment layers and with masks. If you aren't yet familiar with those, there will be better places to start before jumping into these. So, anyway, here's the best books I've read in the last year:

Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis
You will learn significant new color enhancement techniques using the LAB color mode and if you really follow the book, you will learn a lot about layer blend modes, channels, color correction, portrait retouching and Apply Image that are applicable in any color mode. With just the first chapter in this book, you'll learn some powerful color enhancement techniques, but subsequent chapters will take some real practice to learn and absorb, but what the book teaches is very powerful.

Professional Photoshop - The Classic Guide to Color Correction by Dan Margulis
As the title suggests, this book is all about color correction. Some of this book is already covered in the LAB book, but other parts are new and very useful. It's biggest emphasis is teaching you about the CMYK channels and color modes and when to use them to your advantage.

Photoshop Masking & Compositing by Katrin Eismann
This wil probably go down in history as an all-time classic on masking and compositing. If you want to learn a host of techniques for creating masks by using the visual information already in the various channels of your image and then tweaking to suit your purpose, this is the best book for that. It's the kind of book that you get a ton out of it the first time you read it and continue to get more out of it everytime you go back for more.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers by Martin Evening
I bought and used this book as a general reference for tools in PS that I didn't yet really know how to use. For example, when I wanted to learn how the patch tool and healing brush tool really worked, I went to the appropriate pages here. When I wanted to start learning the pen tool, this was a good reference for that. This is more of a photoshop reference book than it is a retouch guide as the previously referenced books have been, but it's saved me significant time learning new tools and techniques.

Adobe Photoshop CS - The Art of Photographing Women by Kevin Ames
This book is not what you would think from the title. It's a book about retouching portraits of women, not about shooting portraits of women. It shows you how to all sorts of "extreme makeover postprocessing techiques" on skin, eyes, hair, tummy tucks, etc... While I find many of the examples in the book a little bit overdone, if you actually read, understand and practice what the book teaches, you will learn a ton about retouching and will find it fairly easy to do some of the more common retouch exercises.

Real World Camera RAW with Adobe Photoshop CS2 by Bruce Fraser
This is the classic book on Adobe Camera RAW. If you shoot RAW and use ACR as your RAW processor, you simply have to read this book or you are missing all sorts of power and efficiency in processing your RAW files.