Sid, how much time did you spend on the mask? Be honest.
Rutt, I spent about 3 hours, maybe longer, on the mask. I tried to be as finicky as possible, so I was down at the pixel level. I think it would take me considerably less time the second time around. But still, even if it takes 1 hour, that's a lot of time.
By the way, I think there's more work to be done to the sky. The girl is fine. If the sky can be made to look a bit more natural, the image will look natural. The part of the sky that's brighter looks odd (overexposed, I'm thinking), and I haven't spent a lot of time trying to correct it. But since I've saved my layers, I don't see why it can't be done.
Oh, and to answer your question about the hair. I did a big, soft edge, high opacity brush around her head. Then I went back with a very small, soft edge, low opacity brush and lightly swept over the hair bits, watching the pixels change color. I was careful not to make any pixels lighter than the adjoining sky. Some pixels stayed blue, some went brown - as long as they weren't overly bright, I didn't care. I figure in a normal photograph, hair's a bunch of different colors.
Thanks, Sid. Thanks, Arjun. Very much. Both of you have really helped me think about this.
First, Rutt, glad both approaches help you.
However, I must really make a disclaimer here:
Please don't consider these methods independent.
As I mentioned in my mail, its all about "starting smart" to get a result that brings you 'closest' to your final result.
The method that I posted is certainly not the end of it. It only brings you to an acceptable starting.
From there, to really do a good job, you _must_ magnify the image, use a low opacity brush and merge the images better to get rid of the halos. This is really important to factor in.
Yes, the halo has a lot to do with how much you blur, how much you
feather and so on - you may want to play with the settings
OK, now I want to be more critical. To be honest, both images look fake to me. Maybe I've just looked at this too long, but as I said, the Singapre girl in front of the harbor also looks fake and I'm sure that was a very expensive effort. Now I can tell you more about what doesn't look right.
Again, do note that a professional retoucher would spend the most amount of time making it look realistic. This image is not a simple matter of curves/sharpening - you are playing a surgeon here. If I were to do a professional job on it, one would spend 3 hrs not 3 minutes.
Amlost all your comments would be addressed in a professional job.
I have another coment about Arjun's technique. Notice the halo it creates. You can see this better on the bottom of the front leg and around the foot. I think this comes from the blur. Is there anyway to control this? Using a smaller number for the blur makes a smaller halo, but then the edge looks even sharper and less natural.
Yep - see above. the key is using a soft edged brush after all of this to fix halos though.
But I still wonder if this image can be saved. Sid came close, but it's still not what I'm looking for. Perhaps this shows that what I want just isn't possible. The defect in this image was just too extreme. Maybe the FM DRI action was right when it lightened the background.
Yes - it can be saved with more effort. And saved very well - you have enough details between the first and second.
Suppose there were a web site where you could submit an image and some instructions (like "select the girl") and within a day you'd get back a mask that did what you wanted? How much would you pay for this service? Ok, here is my implementation: outsource it to India or China. Train people over there to do the painstaking work and pay them the going generous wage. I'm guessing one could charge a reasonable fee for this wrok and still make a nice profit.
There are lots of people here who do it too. Any professional retoucher would do it for you. Typical rates go from $60 to over $100 per hour to as low as $30 for one job.
Yes - it can be saved with more effort. And saved very well - you have enough details between the first and second.
There are lots of people here who do it too. Any professional retoucher would do it for you. Typical rates go from $60 to over $100 per hour to as low as $30 for one job.
Do you freelance yourself? If not can you refer us to good people who do?
Do you freelance yourself? If not can you refer us to good people who do?
Hi Rutt,
I have done retouch jobs for others, but its not my profession, nor am I a serious freelancer - I do it when I have nothing else to do ;-)
There are a lot of professional retouchers at dpreview.com retouching forum -its a great place to meet them (if you ever need restoration, look up Vikki Hansen - www.lifetimephoto.com - she is one of the best I've seen). I met most of them in that forum (they were great teachers above all)
Specific to this photo: I'd seriously suggest: Start with the method I proposed (cuts off a lot of your work). One you have the basic mask ready via this process, fall back to Sid's suggestion of manually working on the mask.
You should have a seamless blend (with respect to halos) with not more than 15 mins of work post the process I explained (use a low opacity soft brush and brush away at her edges).
Then, now that you have separated the sky from the lady, fiddle with blend/modes, levels, selective color etc to work on their color match.
What do you think? To my eye it looks most realistic of the various attempts, though I wish the grass and sand in the background were a little darker. i'm not sure it's possible to get the girl's legs and the grass into the same L range and still have it look realistic.
Anyway, what I did was to follow the instructions here. This link came from the bottom of the LL link that Sam posted. After Arjun's layer mask lesson, this approach made sense. Because it starts with many different images covering the range of contrast in the image, it blends more gradually than Arjun's method and doesn't make hard edges as with a manual selection or only one mask.
After following the instructions, I had to follow the usual color correction and enhancement steps: shawdow/highlight (with small positive values for both shawdow and highligh); curves in both CMYK (to get neutral points and black and white points) and LAB (to bring up detail in the face and increase saturation); USM with both darken and lighten layers with independent opacity.
I suppose the Singapore girl still more dramatic. But to my eye, she looks more fake.
What do you think? To my eye it looks most realistic of the various attempts, though I wish the grass and sand in the background were a little darker. i'm not sure it's possible to get the girl's legs and the grass into the same L range and still have it look realistic.
I think it looks great. I've followed this thread and I'm not sure I have anything more to add. It's very difficult to get your desired results without masking. However, I do have a useful method that is very easy to use that didn't require any tedious selecting or use of brushes for the masks. I did my final in 6 minutes and did not use any levels, curves, etc. This was simply done with blurring and blending.
It's not that I don't think that my final can't be improved with additional PS steps, but I just wanted to show what can be done with simple blending layers.
As Arjun correct stated, you need to start with something close. For this I opened the RAW photo twice, once at -1.5 stops adjusted and one at zero.
The trick I use is a reversed grey scale mask from the zero adjusted photo. In this case, I used the green channel instead of the blue, as I felt the grass AND sky were more equally blown out.
I copied this channel to a new file, converted it to grayscale, and inverted it. I copied the base layer and then used a 5.9 pixel gaussian blur to soften all edges (I copied the base layer because I might need to try a different blur amount). It looked like this:
The next steps are to take a selection of the girl from the zero adjusted photo and merge it with the -1.5 exposed photo.
Hopefully I'll get these steps correct! I did them pretty fast!
1. Change to the Inversed B/W file. Select the blurred layer (Ctrl-A)
2. Change to the Zero adjusted photo and copy the base layer. Select the copied layer
3. Then Select->Load Selection. From the pick list, select the name of your B/W photo for the Document and select Background Gray for the Channel. This should now select around the girl.
4. Use Edit->Fill (50% gray, Color Dodge for the blending mode)
5. Ctrl-J to duplicate the dodged selection. Take a look at this layer by itself, you will see it's basically the girl, but very light and transparent.
6. Copy this layer to the Underexposed photo (right mouse on the layer in the layer palette). Put it above your dark layer.
7. Change the blending mode to Color Dodge and lower the opacity (I used 37%).
8. I then duplicated this layer one more time (Ctrl-J).
9. I then merged all layers into a new layer. The only retouch I did was for the dust spot in the sky.
This was my final:
There are a few things I would improve via layer masking, etc. , but I wanted to demonstrate a very simple PS "fill flash" technique to lighten a dark area. What helped this of course was having a RAW file. It made it very easy to get the background I wanted and the girl the way I wanted. All in all, I think it came out very well for almost no effort!
You can see the original size file to compare. PSD files available on request.
I like it. You did a very nice job. Personally, I think the bright wall's a distraction, I'd bring it down a bit. And I'm sure it's possible to bring down the sky and grass a wee bit. But as a masking exercise, you did a terrific job.
Someone mentioned the wall. I have not said anything as this is not an area that I can even read with understanding.
But the wall..........the wall has bothered me from the beginning. Everyone was talking about the girl and the background and leaving the wall kind of blown, IMO, even when someone made it grayer, it was still blow in that the bricks were not delineated in place, where they were in other places.
Just my 2 cents. I don't do this stuff, I just critique it. You all are so technically smart! I wish I could just do the mask, or maybe I don't wish that.
But I can think, I do think the wall could be helped. I liked your last attempt, Rutt and the one that came after. One thing I do wonder on yours, Rutt, is there a white edge along the top of one of her legs? My hands were itching to blow it up to check.
It was mindlessly repetitive and the first time it took much longer than it should have. But once I understood the steps it only takes about 15 minutes to get things set up with about 10 different raw conversions stacked from light to dark as layers of the same image, each with a layer mask blurred and curved explained in the document here.
After that, it's a matter of playing with the opacity of the various layers. The document explains how to do this, but I found it didn't exacly work the way I thought it should. So I had to play, and really I'm still figuring it out. I don't think it can become a natural technique without deep knowledge of how it works.
The good thing is that it works completely by the lumonosity values of the the various images. There is NO pixel by pixel editing of the image. No surgery. So I think it has the potential to look very natural and become a very quick techique. It invites automation, which is the sort of thing I've been looking for.
There is a Japanese story that I've always loved. A merchant commissioned a drawing of a fish from an artist. The next day the merchant sent for the fish, but word came back that it wasn't finished yet. The same thing happened the next day and the next week and the next month. Eventually the merchant gave up. Two years later, he encountered the artist in the marketplace. It took a moment, but he remembered the artist and the commission. "So what ever happened to the drawing I commissioned you to do?" he asked the artist.
"It's finished now," the artist replied, "Come to my studio and I will give it to you." The merchant was naturally excited and curious to see the picture of the fish that had taken so long to complete. How much work and detail must have gone into it!
At the studio, the artist pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his brush in the inkpot, and effortlessly made a single brush stroke that perfectly captured a trout leaping above a quick stream on a sunny day. The merchant was delighted but puzzeled. "This is wonderful," he said, "but why didn't you do this two years ago? It only took you a minute."
In answer, the artist opened a door and a thousand fish drawings spilled out into the room.
What a pro can do
Just for fun, I paid to have the girl in the window professionally pasted into the properly exposed background. I found Picture Perfect Imaging via google. You can email them (him actually) at info@pictureperfectimaging.ca. The price was $25, so I think it was a bargain. I did have to recorrect the color afterward, but I think it's unlikely that I wouldn't want to do this anyway. Anyway, here is the result:
Just for fun, I paid to have the girl in the window professionally pasted into the properly exposed background. I found Picture Perfect Imaging via google. You can email them (him actually) at info@pictureperfectimaging.ca. The price was $25, so I think it was a bargain. I did have to recorrect the color afterward, but I think it's unlikely that I wouldn't want to do this anyway. Anyway, here is the result:
Hmmm yeah that is pretty good Rutt.. can you post your final version next to this? so we can compare? I thought yours was quite good in the end.
There is a simpler way of doing this. I took the bright image and created another blank layer. I then copied the underexposed image and placed it in the new layer and proceeded to use the erase function on the new layer. This brought the lighter image show through and I just didn't erase the background. It took me about 6 mins to do everything and if I had more time I would use the dodge on the highlight marks around her legs.
There is a simpler way of doing this. I took the bright image and created another blank layer. I then copied the underexposed image and placed it in the new layer and proceeded to use the erase function on the new layer. This brought the lighter image show through and I just didn't erase the background. It took me about 6 mins to do everything and if I had more time I would use the dodge on the highlight marks around her legs.
I don't know if its an artifact of the smaller JPG version you have in the forum post, or that you took only 6 minutes, but the boundaries between her legs and the background look very artificial to me.
Comments
Rutt, I spent about 3 hours, maybe longer, on the mask. I tried to be as finicky as possible, so I was down at the pixel level. I think it would take me considerably less time the second time around. But still, even if it takes 1 hour, that's a lot of time.
By the way, I think there's more work to be done to the sky. The girl is fine. If the sky can be made to look a bit more natural, the image will look natural. The part of the sky that's brighter looks odd (overexposed, I'm thinking), and I haven't spent a lot of time trying to correct it. But since I've saved my layers, I don't see why it can't be done.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
First, Rutt, glad both approaches help you.
However, I must really make a disclaimer here:
Please don't consider these methods independent.
As I mentioned in my mail, its all about "starting smart" to get a result that brings you 'closest' to your final result.
The method that I posted is certainly not the end of it. It only brings you to an acceptable starting.
From there, to really do a good job, you _must_ magnify the image, use a low opacity brush and merge the images better to get rid of the halos. This is really important to factor in.
Yes, the halo has a lot to do with how much you blur, how much you
feather and so on - you may want to play with the settings
Again, do note that a professional retoucher would spend the most amount of time making it look realistic. This image is not a simple matter of curves/sharpening - you are playing a surgeon here. If I were to do a professional job on it, one would spend 3 hrs not 3 minutes.
Amlost all your comments would be addressed in a professional job.
Yep - see above. the key is using a soft edged brush after all of this to fix halos though.
Yes - it can be saved with more effort. And saved very well - you have enough details between the first and second.
There are lots of people here who do it too. Any professional retoucher would do it for you. Typical rates go from $60 to over $100 per hour to as low as $30 for one job.
regds
arjun
I have done retouch jobs for others, but its not my profession, nor am I a serious freelancer - I do it when I have nothing else to do ;-)
There are a lot of professional retouchers at dpreview.com retouching forum -its a great place to meet them (if you ever need restoration, look up Vikki Hansen - www.lifetimephoto.com - she is one of the best I've seen). I met most of them in that forum (they were great teachers above all)
Specific to this photo: I'd seriously suggest: Start with the method I proposed (cuts off a lot of your work). One you have the basic mask ready via this process, fall back to Sid's suggestion of manually working on the mask.
You should have a seamless blend (with respect to halos) with not more than 15 mins of work post the process I explained (use a low opacity soft brush and brush away at her edges).
Then, now that you have separated the sky from the lady, fiddle with blend/modes, levels, selective color etc to work on their color match.
regds
arjun
What do you think? To my eye it looks most realistic of the various attempts, though I wish the grass and sand in the background were a little darker. i'm not sure it's possible to get the girl's legs and the grass into the same L range and still have it look realistic.
Anyway, what I did was to follow the instructions here. This link came from the bottom of the LL link that Sam posted. After Arjun's layer mask lesson, this approach made sense. Because it starts with many different images covering the range of contrast in the image, it blends more gradually than Arjun's method and doesn't make hard edges as with a manual selection or only one mask.
After following the instructions, I had to follow the usual color correction and enhancement steps: shawdow/highlight (with small positive values for both shawdow and highligh); curves in both CMYK (to get neutral points and black and white points) and LAB (to bring up detail in the face and increase saturation); USM with both darken and lighten layers with independent opacity.
I suppose the Singapore girl still more dramatic. But to my eye, she looks more fake.
It's not that I don't think that my final can't be improved with additional PS steps, but I just wanted to show what can be done with simple blending layers.
As Arjun correct stated, you need to start with something close. For this I opened the RAW photo twice, once at -1.5 stops adjusted and one at zero.
The trick I use is a reversed grey scale mask from the zero adjusted photo. In this case, I used the green channel instead of the blue, as I felt the grass AND sky were more equally blown out.
I copied this channel to a new file, converted it to grayscale, and inverted it. I copied the base layer and then used a 5.9 pixel gaussian blur to soften all edges (I copied the base layer because I might need to try a different blur amount). It looked like this:
The next steps are to take a selection of the girl from the zero adjusted photo and merge it with the -1.5 exposed photo.
Hopefully I'll get these steps correct! I did them pretty fast!
1. Change to the Inversed B/W file. Select the blurred layer (Ctrl-A)
2. Change to the Zero adjusted photo and copy the base layer. Select the copied layer
3. Then Select->Load Selection. From the pick list, select the name of your B/W photo for the Document and select Background Gray for the Channel. This should now select around the girl.
4. Use Edit->Fill (50% gray, Color Dodge for the blending mode)
5. Ctrl-J to duplicate the dodged selection. Take a look at this layer by itself, you will see it's basically the girl, but very light and transparent.
6. Copy this layer to the Underexposed photo (right mouse on the layer in the layer palette). Put it above your dark layer.
7. Change the blending mode to Color Dodge and lower the opacity (I used 37%).
8. I then duplicated this layer one more time (Ctrl-J).
9. I then merged all layers into a new layer. The only retouch I did was for the dust spot in the sky.
This was my final:
There are a few things I would improve via layer masking, etc. , but I wanted to demonstrate a very simple PS "fill flash" technique to lighten a dark area. What helped this of course was having a RAW file. It made it very easy to get the background I wanted and the girl the way I wanted. All in all, I think it came out very well for almost no effort!
You can see the original size file to compare. PSD files available on request.
Great thread people
Regards,
Brad
www.digismile.ca
I like it.
How long did it take you?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
regds
arjun
But the wall..........the wall has bothered me from the beginning. Everyone was talking about the girl and the background and leaving the wall kind of blown, IMO, even when someone made it grayer, it was still blow in that the bricks were not delineated in place, where they were in other places.
Just my 2 cents. I don't do this stuff, I just critique it. You all are so technically smart! I wish I could just do the mask, or maybe I don't wish that.
But I can think, I do think the wall could be helped. I liked your last attempt, Rutt and the one that came after. One thing I do wonder on yours, Rutt, is there a white edge along the top of one of her legs? My hands were itching to blow it up to check.
Cuttin and runnin
the spoiler,
g
what? you lost me at the start!
i know the problem your talkin about, but, no idea how to fix it.
After that, it's a matter of playing with the opacity of the various layers. The document explains how to do this, but I found it didn't exacly work the way I thought it should. So I had to play, and really I'm still figuring it out. I don't think it can become a natural technique without deep knowledge of how it works.
The good thing is that it works completely by the lumonosity values of the the various images. There is NO pixel by pixel editing of the image. No surgery. So I think it has the potential to look very natural and become a very quick techique. It invites automation, which is the sort of thing I've been looking for.
There is a Japanese story that I've always loved. A merchant commissioned a drawing of a fish from an artist. The next day the merchant sent for the fish, but word came back that it wasn't finished yet. The same thing happened the next day and the next week and the next month. Eventually the merchant gave up. Two years later, he encountered the artist in the marketplace. It took a moment, but he remembered the artist and the commission. "So what ever happened to the drawing I commissioned you to do?" he asked the artist.
"It's finished now," the artist replied, "Come to my studio and I will give it to you." The merchant was naturally excited and curious to see the picture of the fish that had taken so long to complete. How much work and detail must have gone into it!
At the studio, the artist pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, dipped his brush in the inkpot, and effortlessly made a single brush stroke that perfectly captured a trout leaping above a quick stream on a sunny day. The merchant was delighted but puzzeled. "This is wonderful," he said, "but why didn't you do this two years ago? It only took you a minute."
In answer, the artist opened a door and a thousand fish drawings spilled out into the room.
Moving the old thread to Hall of Wisdom froze it in time, it didn't update with the newer posts. So I'm re-saving it.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Just for fun, I paid to have the girl in the window professionally pasted into the properly exposed background. I found Picture Perfect Imaging via google. You can email them (him actually) at info@pictureperfectimaging.ca. The price was $25, so I think it was a bargain. I did have to recorrect the color afterward, but I think it's unlikely that I wouldn't want to do this anyway. Anyway, here is the result:
g
I don't know if its an artifact of the smaller JPG version you have in the forum post, or that you took only 6 minutes, but the boundaries between her legs and the background look very artificial to me.
A former sports shooter
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