Help with wedding pictures!!

Rhuarc

Hello everyone! It's been awhile since I've been on, alot going on! In the last 3 months I've gotten married and moved to Seattle. My question is this. A good friend of mine has a Canon 5D and is learning to do weddings so he agreed to shoot our wedding. Overall I'm perfectly happy with the pictures, but since he gave me a copy of all the raw files I decided to try my hand at getting them to look good.. I'm trying to get the color right on these pictures. Here is the best I've been able to do so far:



When I go to print them out there is barely any color in the skin tones. Here is a link to the DNG file.

http://thehangar.ecwhost.com/Files/Pictures/Wedding%20030.dng

Could someone give this a shot at correcting these and help me out? I've tried all kinds of things and nothing is really working!! Thanks!!

The entire gallery so far is available to view here
http://wendell.smugmug.com/gallery/1813754/2/90669834

AntoineD

Well, I think your post-processing is quite ok.

Here is What I've done :




I've just processed it through camera raw. I did no change with my tablet.
I've set the white balance on their collars.

Desaturate a little. Some other few things, too, like a little more brightness, 1/2 stop more.

Link to the DNG
Link to the Tiff

BinaryFx

Rhuarc wrote:

When I go to print them out there is barely any color in the skin tones.

Could someone give this a shot at correcting these and help me out?

Rhuarc, here is my analysis and advice.

The faces/skin-tone are a little lacking in the red/cyan component, and general luminance variation. They may also require a boost in magenta/yellow component too, but I would first start with the red/cyan channel.

When an RGB image translates into print, the red channel component will often be similar to the cyan. In a CMYK image, the cyan channel is often the key to successful reproduction of skin-tones. When people think that the skin is too red, it is not so much a case of the skin having too much magenta/yellow colour component - but not enough cyan. This is the opposing "unwanted" colour, cyan in red - that desaturates the pure red or magenta hue. Even if working in RGB, the same thing applies (red/cyan channel).

Often even a "perfect" RGB image has to be "corrected" so that the numbers that make up the colours in the file, when linked to an ICC profile that describes the RGB file and then converted to the printing space print in a satisfactory manner. Again, for skintones, this is often a case of the red/cyan channel being deficiant (but the magenta may also be too high or the yellow too low as well etc).

So, one very quick fix would be to:

1. Using Photoshop, duplicate the flat background image into a new layer.

2. In the channels palette, click on the red channel, this will be our target channel where the edit will be performed.

2b. Click on the eye symbol on the RGB channel in the channels palette, but not on the text...just the eye! We wish to only have the single red channel targeted and not the RGB composite channel, but we also wish to view the edit in realtime as full colour RGB composite. Ignore this step if you are confused by this description, it is only there to make things a little easier when editing single channels.

3. Using the Apply Image command, with the background as the source layer and the pre-targeted red channel as the destination or target (not the RGB composite), apply the darker green or blue source channel to the red target channel in Darken blend mode.

4. In the channels palette, target the composite RGB channel by clicking on it's name so that you are back to editing as normal.

5. Change the upper layer that has just been channel blended, from normal layer blend mode to luminosity. The colour should be retained, but more density, depth and definition should now be found in the skintones.

6. There are many ways to apply this change to only the skin, using a layer mask.

One way could be to load the red channel of the background layer as a selection and to make that into a layer mask and to further refine it to isolate only the skin and not the background or clothing etc.

Another way could be with luminosity/density masks or layer option blend if sliders.

Adjust the opacity or layer masking to reduce the blend effect of the upper layer, if you think that the skin is now de-saturated too much.

To start, I would just look at enhancing the red channel. If the prints are still not to your liking, then you may need to make the skin-tones a little darker (the image adjust - shadow/highlight command is often good for minor darkening of light skintones).

Anyway, please kick this around for a little and then get back to me if you have more questions Rhuarc.


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/