Help with bluish skin tones?

DJ-S1

My 5 y.o. is on his first T-ball team, and I wanted to get a nice shot of him in his new hat. Of course, he wanted to clown around and made several faces while I had the lens pointed at him. I snapped off a shot anyway, and I'll be darned if I didn't catch him in the millisecond between "monster faces"!

Problem is, it was near sunset and he was moving around, so the image came out dark and soft. But being the dad I love it anyway because he looks so serious and grown-up.

I ran it through i2e and it did a great job with it except for a blue cast on his cheeks. All I want to do is make that blue more natural looking skin tones. The softness and grain and all the other problems with the shot I want to leave as is - it looks pretty good in print (much better than on-screen).

I know some PS but all my tricks aren't working for this. Anyone want to take it on for me? Please??




(Click the picture for full-size)

nikos

Original

I'm off to bed now

jjbong

You have at least three problems to fix. One is an overall "Blue cast" on the face. There's nowhere near enough yellow (for a light skinned person, yellow and magenta should be about equal). Also, cyan is much too high. Both of these can be fixed easily with curves in CMYK. After doing that, you need to handle the rough areas on the outside of the face on both sides, but much more pronounced on his left side. I did a quick channel blend of black into cyan (I forget the opacity, sorry), and tweaked the results with a curve or two. All of this took less than 5 minutes. Not perfect, but much better.

(I'm new to dgrin - I think I've attached my version, but I'm not certain).

jjbong

And doing this quickly to show you how to fix the major problems in the face,
I paid no attention to color in the background, shirt, etc.

DJ-S1

Thanks for your efforts guys - they are definitely better than the original but I'm not sure they are quite right yet. I appreciate the time you spent.

I kind of curious about the change in thread title - I thought I made it clear in the intro that I don't care about the softness. When printed wallet size for the grandparents and aunts and uncles it looks sharp enough. The only thing is the darker blue areas on the cheeks that looks unnatural.

In my attempts at fixing the cheeks the changes are more objectionable than the blue is. D

VisualXpressions

in PSCS I applied an 85 warming filter at 80%



Winston

Duffy Pratt

Here's a quick try. I applied the Green channel in Luminosity mode, and limited it with Blend If sliders so the Red in the hat in the lips didn't darken. Then straightforward RGB curves to set the letter in the hat to white, and to get the skin tones reasonable.

Duffy

rutt

A piece of cake.

1. Convert to LAB
2. Duplicate layer
3. Get big soft brush. Sample a nice rosy color from somewhere good.
4. Paint over the ugly blue spots. Be sloppy. Don't worry be happy for now, jsust cover them all up. Don't worry about staying inside the lines.
5. Convert the blending mode of the duplicate layer to color
6. Use the Blend-If sliders in the blending options to restrict the blend to just the parts you care about. For a first take, I excluded the darker parts of the image until my coloring didn't effect the background or hair.

I did this in less than 5 minutes. Clearly you'll do a little better in 10 minutes. Maybe be more careful in choosing the colors to paint (don't use just one, e.g.)

Really, it's just a simple variation of this Dan Margulis classic