Unsure what to do?

sebpayne

I have this photo which I took at a party last Saturday:



I have fiddle around with Camera Raw but I could not get a 'good photo'. Are there any suggestions on what I can do? The faces seem 'too red' and the walls 'too white'. If I adjust the saturation, one looks good and one looks bad. It is a good photo (the subjects) but I can't get the rest right! Any advice is willingly taken. I can supply a bigger DNG/JPEG if anyone wants to have a go at improving it

Thanks

Seb

geoeremite

I took a quick stab and ended up with this:

sebpayne wrote:

I have fiddle around with Camera Raw but I could not get a 'good photo'. Are there any suggestions on what I can do?

I'm still working my way through the LAB book, so of course everything looks like a LABnail. After converting to LAB, I adjusted the a and b curves to get closer to neutrality into the walls and a better mix into the skin tones. I tried a couple of things but ended up opting to leave magenta in the cheeks rather than removing all of it. Here are the A and B curves from that first layer:


And the way it looked after that first adjustment layer:



I've found it easier to use two adjustment layers; the first to get the color mix and the second to get the pop/saturation I want. In the second adjustment layer, I brought in the white and black points and added contrast across the faces in the L channel; typical steepening of the A and B channels to get a bit more color. Here are those curves:



Finally, I converted through RBG into CMYK and steepened the K channel (probably too much) to get a bit more contrast in the dark blues and blacks with a curve like this:



Hope this helps,
Scott