A peek at my post production

Blurmore

Portraits taken today at the Marriot downtown. I muffed 2 things, I had the camera in auto white balance AND I forgot to swtich lenses from the 28 for a larger group to the 85 for this smaller group. I worked it over, and like the results.


Here were the steps...

1. Shot in RAW 400 iso f5 1/8th of a sec 28mm f2.8, Alien Bee 800, Brolly box.
2. Adobe RAW for exposure +75 bright, +.40 exposure, temp 3800 -26 tint
3. Adjustment Layer Color balance, shadows shifted to blue and cyan +16 blue -10 to cyan, mids shifted midly to blue and green less than 10
4. Healing brush on fine lines and wrinkles, eye and tooth scrub
5. Masked background color balance S/M/H all shifted to blue
6. Lens blur filter on background
7. final tweak and CMYK check on skintones, warming photo filter applied


I ended up really liking the results of this shot, but because I was burning the background with ambient incandescent light the shadows went REALLY yellow. My post abilities are certainly still developing. I pride myself on TRYING to get skin tones both right and consistent shot to shot, but I am really looking for a reliable way to do it in camera to cut down on post. I don't white or gray card yet, but I really need to start. Anyone with comments or suggestions on controling WB and mixed lighting casts please go right ahead.

Have a happy holiday whatever it may be.



right out of the camera



post post

lynnma

Blurmore wrote:

Portraits taken today at the Marriot downtown. I muffed 2 things, I had the camera in auto white balance AND I forgot to swtich lenses from the 28 for a larger group to the 85 for this smaller group. I worked it over, and like the results.


Here were the steps...

1. Shot in RAW 400 iso f5 1/8th of a sec 28mm f2.8, Alien Bee 800, Brolly box.
2. Adobe RAW for exposure +75 bright, +.40 exposure, temp 3800 -26 tint
3. Adjustment Layer Color balance, shadows shifted to blue and cyan +16 blue -10 to cyan, mids shifted midly to blue and green less than 10
4. Healing brush on fine lines and wrinkles, eye and tooth scrub
5. Masked background color balance S/M/H all shifted to blue
6. Lens blur filter on background
7. final tweak and CMYK check on skintones, warming photo filter applied


I ended up really liking the results of this shot, but because I was burning the background with ambient incandescent light the shadows went REALLY yellow. My post abilities are certainly still developing. I pride myself on TRYING to get skin tones both right and consistent shot to shot, but I am really looking for a reliable way to do it in camera to cut down on post. I don't white or gray card yet, but I really need to start. Anyone with comments or suggestions on controling WB and mixed lighting casts please go right ahead.

Have a happy holiday whatever it may be.

right out of the camera
post post

Wow. ... you did a great job on the skin in my humble.. I think I would have darkened down the background just a tad.. it hit me as very bright and distracted me a bit.
Have a Merry Christmas, or Happy Holiday!

JimM

Personally, I like the first one better.

Blurmore

A more natural approach
I realized after Jim's comments that I was trying to go too far from center with this, it is a decent picture with only a slight color cast, and I opened the shadows way much with brightness in converting from raw. So here is a more natural approach with a slightly darker background as per Lynn's comments.

Owen

Excellent post work.

Just OOC, did you use a custom white balance to start with?

Blurmore

Custom white balance, color temp 5600k. I have noticed that my AB lights with both the Westcott & Lightware boxes produce a strong magenta cast. I really need to start shooting a card, or using a cap or some WB toy, but I don't know which is best. But I need something, because the amount of correcting I do is obscene.

jfriend

Tried one myself

Blurmore wrote:

Portraits taken today at the Marriot downtown. I muffed 2 things, I had the camera in auto white balance AND I forgot to swtich lenses from the 28 for a larger group to the 85 for this smaller group. I worked it over, and like the results.

This is a pretty nice photo, mostly just needs a little color correction and some fixes for the background.

I hadn't seen your second post processing attempt (which is quite good) when I made this one, but it's along a similar lines to that one. I like your second approach better than your first post processing attempt.

The two main things I added were to straighten up the photo some (the off vertical lines in the background on both left and right were really pulling at me in the original and the lights in the background were just too distracting. I also thought the skin tone was too red. Here's what I did:

• Switch to LAB mode
• Rotate to align left background walls with left edge
• Slight transform to align right background walls right right edge
• Crop (both to tighten the focus on the people and because of the image rotation to align the edges)
• A little shadow/highlights to restore shadow detail in faces in the L channel
• Use spot healing brush on various face blemishes (mostly on the young man)
• Remove some skin shine on the young man
• Remove some color irregularity (due to blown channels) in the background bright lighted areas)
• Make a mask for the bright lights in the background using the luminosity channel with a curve applied to isolate the bright areas in the background
• Apply a curve to the lights in the back to tone them down
• Desaturate slightly and change hue of background lights to de-emphasize them (they were really detracting from the foreground)
• Overall L curve for brightness
• Some color correction curves in the A and B channels to get the CMYK values to look right (basically there was a little too much Magenta or not enough Yellow)
• Slight sharpening

Here's what I came up with:

jfriend

One more with a bit darker background
Here's one more the same as my previous, but with the background darkened a bit.

While I like blurred backgrounds for photos like this, I'm not quite yet sold on the blurring you've done in your retouch. It doesn't quite seem real to me. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think the edge around the man just looks too sharp or "cut-out" and there isn't any depth to the blurring in various places (needs less blurring in portions of the carpet, some blur on the chair, etc...).

So, rather than blur, I just darkened it a bit (curve on the L channel with a rought mask).