Kicking And Screaming All The Way

saurora

Kicking and screaming all the way, yep, I finally have a shot that requires all the PS skills that (so far) I have managed to avoid learning! :rolleyes Technically this is not a great shot....(not exposed well and shot into the light...plus one subject is slightly out of focus ), but it's one of those "priceless" family moments that can't be re-shot (the kid is already a month older!). I worked it up the best that I could in RAW but it still needs a lot of adjusting. (Yeah, I probably should move into LAB...I never got past chapter one!) The big issue I'm having (along with needing to "pop" it, is menopausal skin!!! My poor sister is constantly flashing and her skin is blotchy and red, plus she is normally very fair-skinned. I can't seem to deal well with the red areas (mainly on her neck). I have attempted some cloning.....finding an area of "good" skin to clone from is a challenge, plus all kinds of shading going on. Used selective coloring, tried different color "adjustments". In cloning, I end up with some good and some bad areas. When I do a global curves adjustment, those areas become real problems!! Arrrrgggghhhh! I should have used a mask layer (I've only done a couple of those...that would require re-reading!) to get more detail and depth in her hair, but I ended up cheating and just lassoed and adjusted. Eh...who really cares. The other attempt at "glamorizing" was to shave the double chin. (She really hates it!!!) I may have gone over-board for my first attempt...I notice in the original that her grandson has inherited the same trait!!! Ok, now that I have vented my frustration, :bash I think I'll take a break and go shopping. Oh, that reminds me...I am still working on this shot and wondering just "how much" PS can a shot take before it gets ugly???? I can only stand just so much time in the darkroom at a time!!!) :tiptoe

Partially edited version:



Original out of RAW:

BinaryFx

Hi saurora, is this sort of what you are looking for?

If so, I'll give you general step by step - that way you can become a little more dangerous!

All done in sRGB, no LAB required but that is not to say that LAB would not handle this well too.

P.S. As you shoot RAW, I will adapt my instructions to take advantage of the RAW file.


Regards,

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

rutt

Hey, Stephen, great to see you here! As a mutual friend would say, you are a tough customer. I was playing with this to see what I could do, but I like yours a lot better than what I got. Maybe I'll have to try from scratch.

nikos

I had some extra time to kill on my mac at work (screen not calibrated) and I decided to use various techniques I recently learned from Dan Margulis's LAB book with a few of my normal routines in RGB.

I can't remember my exact workflow on this since I was experimenting various techniques but I did perform the S/H in LAB and did some additional tweaking to the luminosity on a separate layer to bring out the background and some detail in the hot areas of the faces.

photocat

Why not go into the hue and saturation under image adjustment, and put it on red. Then desaturate the red a little bit, till the most evident blotches are gone.

That would be my first trick if the flashes are bad...

What I do when I have bad coloring for people shots is put them in black and white. Some shots just don't work well in color.
There is only so much time I want to spend on a picture, if it is bad, nothing will make it good. Remember: there is the CHUCK... Of course, if this photograph is a one off chance and emotionally important, you might want to keep it anyway...

I probably would also chip a bit off the chin of the little boy, as it seems to have a weird angle, or is that just me?

Write me off list if you want! ;o))))

BinaryFx

rutt wrote:

Hey, Stephen, great to see you here! As a mutual friend would say, you are a tough customer. I was playing with this to see what I could do, but I like yours a lot better than what I got. Maybe I'll have to try from scratch.

Hi John, thanks for the greeting!

Me, a tough customer? Nah, I'm just a little teddy bear!

I like the community spirit here and hope to be able to help pass on what I have picked up over my time.

Thanks for the compliment...I'll post a blow by blow seeing as how you liked things, cheers!


P.S. For all the Grinners wondering where we know each other, John and myself are both moderators on the Applied Color Theory in Photoshop list, run by Dan Margulis (this forum is *rather different* in spirit : )


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

BinaryFx

OK, as I promised here is the first half of the correction, the second half will have to wait. This is how I handled the blown sky and filling in the shadows.

John, this is partly how I handled your self portrait case study that was backlit, instead of using Shadow/Highlight or Dan's method...I made my own!

Initital thoughts before reading the info palette was that the sky was blown and that the shadows needed opening as well as a general colour fix. My gameplan was to restore the shadow and highlight detail, then to fix colour/tone and then to polish a little.


I did not have access to the Camera Raw file, but one can obviously attempt to rescue the highlights in a second render, by using negative exposure values in Adobe Camera Raw. If one has RawShooter Pro or Adobe LightRoom, one can also have a look at the “Fill Light” option as well as good old positive values in the exposure slider.


These are the steps I took in my correction. It sounds longer and harder than it is, really! It just takes lot’s of words to try to explain, if you try it is much easier (I hope):


1. Assign ColorMatch RGB instead of sRGB to open the shadows a bit (I did not wish to increase saturation at this point, so no false 1.8 gamma profile based off Adobe RGB was required).

2. Converted to sRGB for the rest of my edits, the image or edits do not need a wider space in my opinion.

3. Now to fix the blown sky. I duped the background layer and set it to Darken blend mode. I then pulled in the highlight output level to darken all the pure white values in the image to about 7% gray, darkening the image a bit in the lighter tones. I then loaded a selction off the blue channel to and added a layer mask, so that the people were not overly affected by the highlight darkening. I then touched up with black in the mask with a brush to make an specular highlights show through as I did not wish these to be darkened. One may wish to experiment with the Shadow/Highlight command here to darken the sky only, but I just used levels and added a little bit of soft minor noise to the darkened sky. I kept it neutral, but a slight blue tint may be preferred. Blend if sliders can be used instead of the mask, more on these on the next point, I need to keep this simple!

4. I find myself using the Shadow/Highlight command less and less these days for lightening shadows, but it is great on detail. So, instead of S/H - add a new curves layer, set to Linear Dodge mode. This opens up the shadows but blows the midtones and highlights. This is easily fixed with some Blend If sliders. Layer Options menu (or double click to the right of the layer name), Blending options – I left it at the default blend if gray setting. No curve edits take place in this step, the curve adjustment layer is there for blending modes, not curving (one could dupe the background layer and change to Linear Dodge to lighten the original images shadows, but this takes more memory than an adjustment layer).

Opt/Alt click the upper This Layer highlight slider to split it in two and drag the left half of the slider triangle to the extreme left shadow point so that the highlight reads as 0/255 instead of the default 255. Do the same for the lower Underlying Layer highlight slider so both highlights in this blend layer read as 0/255.

This should give a nice, natural blend with no masks needed. Hit OK to leave the blending options/layer style controls.

The blend if gray layer options blend if sliders are a great alternative to alpha channel/layer masks and have some very good uses in LAB mode where the AB colour is separated from the tone. If you have not looked at them before, you will probably wish to do so after this walk through!


5. Duplicate this Linear Dodge layer and change it to Screen blend mode at 25% opacity or whatever you like to suit. One can experiment here with the opacity and stacking order of these two layers. This Screen layer just boosts the previous Linear Dodge correction slightly, lighter but with less contrast than Linear Dodge. One could skip this step and perhaps just play with the curve in step 4 or do both.


OK, that is more than enough for now!

Hope this helps,

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

rutt

This version might be competitive. I tried the false profile move, but thought Dan's inverted overlay blurred blend at medium opacity did a better job. Used the healing brush on the red blotches on her face. Then more or less followed Dan's LAB portrait workflow. I have one variation on this which I learned from Edgework and now use nearly every time: duplicate and convert to CMYK. Use the inverted K channel as a layer mask for curves to push the shadows without plugging them.

Also, I try to be careful with HIRALOAM sharpening to avoid visible halos. In this case, I used split blend-if sliders on the sharpened layer to eliminate the very lightest halos.

BinaryFx

More than competitive John, I like it!

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

saurora

Well, I went shopping and bought a new lens (Canon 300mm f/4 IS USM) and that definitely helped my mood! Then this morning I find all these wonderful responses clap!!!!! It still amazes me the lengths members will go to help someone out...you guys rule!

Stephen: Wow......Nice to "meet you"! I was hoping Rutt would stop by (which he did ) and then I find your lengthy post with very explicit instructions. Thank you, thank you, thank you! bow I haven't had a chance to put this great info into practice, but printed out the thread so I could have it in hand to follow step by step! I always read all posts by certain members, and you are definitely added to my list!

Rutt: So glad you came by! We should call you Dr. Rutt for being able to fix all these Photoshop delimas......even more so for being able to read, digest and understand all of Dan's books! I have his new one on order...and look forward to following your summary! Thank you for the pointers and the bread crumbs to follow!

Nikos: Nice to "meet you" too! Another Dan Fan! You did a great job and I appreciate your posting. I am noticing (on my monitor) that everyone's post is very yellow compared to my post.... I think I better calibrate this week.....

Catherine: Nice to hear from you! I thought about e-mailing this file directly to you as I know from prior experience you could fix it! But I also thought it would be helpful to other readers to listen in. I did try what you suggested as far as de-saturating the red. It worked some, but I was still having problems. Thanks for coming by and don't be a stranger (I know you've been busy, busy!) Yes.....I do B/W conversions for the impossible files, too!

saurora

I will use all of your great advice and give this shot another go-around. I'll re-post my efforts to see what you think. Thanks to all, this just was a shot I didn't want to give up on!

UT Scott

I don't do a whole lot of PS, but I got bored and figured I'd have a crack at it. I think I went a little overboard on the healing brush and I think my monitor colour is way out of wack

This is what I came up with using lab colour, unsharp mask on only the woman, and then curves and some healing brush.

saurora

Thanks, UT! For someone who has doesn't do much Photoshop, I think you did a fantastic job. From what I can see on my screen, the only thing that looks overdone is the sharpening, otherwise it looks great.

j-bo

I dunno UT. I think yours looks the most natural of all of them. The others look overdone and fake to me.

I think along with whomever else said it, that a B/W would be best for this photo.