PS Pros: Please help me with an image

drcarl

Always shooting, I went sailing with a buddy. My sister loves one of my shots and wants to make a gift of an 8x10.

I have been tutoring myself on skin tones, eyedroppers, calibration (no monitor calibration hardware yet), sharpening, --PP in general (and in specific)

Thanks to this forum, I am learning a lot very quickly (eyedropper info, etc.), have much to learn still, and now have another question/request.

I'd like to see if I can have (at least three?) Pros manipulate my image. I'd also like to learn what was done. I have (and have worked a lot on) the "before" - I'd like to see some "afters" PP'd by others.

Here's a link to the original:
http://drcarl.smugmug.com/gallery/3493431/1/196890494#196890494


As is, on my first SM print with my version of PP-ing, my friend in the image looks more "sunburned" than he really was. My sister says he's also "too green" under his jaw.

I'd like to see what you can do.

I'll send you my gmail addy for your version unless there is a better way.

I will be printing through SM and using the ezprints profile to soft proof.

I really appreciate your real world input on this learning image that I have been spending so much time with.

TIA

--drcarl

Here's a big thumbnail for your initial perusal...

jfriend

drcarl wrote:

I'd like to see what you can do.

Neat portrait. I'm not a pro, but I like to play. Here's one attempt at a retouch:

• Removed some blue with a curve to raise the yellow over the magenta.
• Removed some magenta from the reds using a selective color adjustment layer to neutralize the over-red.
• Raised brightness of the darker tones with a curve and a rough mask for the sky.
• Sharpened a bit.

Full sized retouch is here.

One quick way to tweak the skin tone on this image is to add a selective color adjustment layer, select the red tones at the top and then either add cyan or remove magenta to taste to lessen the reddish look. In this particular image, I did a little of both, but removing magenta seemed more powerful.

drcarl

Thanx!
I like to play, too...and I want to learn to play ever better.

Thank you for your shot at it. I'll pour over what you did and probably go through the same steps as my learning process.

It'll be interesting to me to see what it looks like Soft Proofing in PS with the ezprints profile...to me, on my (new) uncalibrated LCD monitor, still looks a bit yellow...

THANX!

--dr carl

Duffy Pratt

I'm no pro, but I gave it a shot anyways. I hope thats OK.

I added a color and a luminosity layer.

On the luminosity layer, I steepened the curves to bring contrast and some brightness to his face, while holding the detail in the smoke pretty constant.

On the color layer, I adjusted for the skin tone, while keeping the smoke neutral. I saw no need to neutralize the sky, I like it with the bluish tinge. And I decided that, with his jacket and the suggestion of the great outdoors, his face could stand to retain some of its ruddy nature. So I didn't bring down the blue that much, just a tad. I boosted the red to kill some cyan in the face, and also boosted the green a very, very slight amount.

Took the image to LAB, where I did Margulis' AB overlay trick for portraits, and dialed the opacity all the way back to 8. Then I did a hiraloam sharpen -- something like 45, 24, 0, and then a very light Smart
Sharpen on the L channel -- radius like .7 pixels, amount about 100.

Duffy

jfriend

drcarl wrote:

I like to play, too...and I want to learn to play ever better.

Thank you for your shot at it. I'll pour over what you did and probably go through the same steps as my learning process.

It'll be interesting to me to see what it looks like Soft Proofing in PS with the ezprints profile...to me, on my (new) uncalibrated LCD monitor, still looks a bit yellow...

THANX!

--dr carl

The color you want for this skin-tone is really personal preference and how you want to convey the scene. The lighting is non-standard so you can't just go by pure numeric guidelines - you have to decide what you want it to look like or how you remember it or how you know this person to look. This is where art meets photography.

Removing magenta makes it look more yellow. Removing less magenta makes it look more red. Bring up a selective color layer, pick the red colors at the top of the dialog and then play with the magenta slider. You will see that you can make it as red or as yellow as you want. You can experiment with adding cyan (the top slider) for a different effect.

My retouch is entirely within the EzPrints ICC profile (nothing out of gamut) so it should print as you see it on a calibrated screen.

drcarl

Wow!
jfriend - woo - thanx for the GREAT info....

duffy - OMG - you ROCKED it...wow...I gotta learn what all those terms are and how to do it....iteven looks good on non-color managed ie7!

When I first came across Smugmug, I wanted to put my cameras down because, after seeing so many snappy and awesome photos, well, I knew my images were just 'not there'...now that I am plowing forward, even though I know I've a bunch to learn, I ~can~ see the light at the end of the, or somewhere here in the middle of, the tunnel!

You guys ROCK!

THANX!!!

---dr carl

PS...Duff...now, um, can ya send me the big file? I just might print it, ya-know

edgework

I did some serious revising of the image, which, from an aesthetic point of view, might be wholly unwarranted. If you had shot this for an ad, however, this is the type of move that would be requested. In fact, they might want the sky even darker, to make the knock-out type readable.

pyrtek

Here's my take:



Original is here:

http://bertold.zenfolio.com/p53652483/?photo=h1625E24D#371581517

RogersDA

Here's my take on this. Granted it goes beyond the realativley smoother skin of the original, and the person may not like that. However, this was done for artistic/learning reasons.

drcarl

wow

!!!WoW!!!

I get tied up for a few days, and what do I come back to but The Many Faces of Dan!

Nice jobs! I am amazed at how many photos there are within one photo.

Rogers: I am constantly fighting the urge (and sometimes I lose) to making some of the Art ones. Yours is bumping into The Old Man and The Sea look. Fun! I'm subjectively liking how the smoke looks on yours, and the clothing. What were your steps, generally, if you remember...

Pyrtek/Bernard: amazing. What were YOUR steps? At first, so far, yours was jumping out as my favorite. I know we are getting into the "personal taste" area, and that you guys weren't there, and don't know the (nice) man...and, I've not stated any particular mission for the image. I love what you did. He'd probably love it too since it makes him look about 10 years younger. People often like that. Did you airbrush him with some skin color? How DID you do what you did?

Edge: At first I was loving Pyrtek's efforts...but now I'm on the fence. See, his (to me) is better as a stand-alone image disregarding what my buddy really looks like. I'm liking yours because it's more "him" (some of the skin roughness is retained), and the colors are not Martian or Venutian (like my original). Nice job.

They are ALL great.

I wonder what I'd get if I put Edge's on top of Bernard's and adjusted the transparency. That is SO cheating. All you guys' work and me blending them up. Gotta laugh a little, right?

Thank you, fellows....and thank you Photoshop, computers, image sensors, lens makers, dgrin, printers, oh, and Subjects!

Thank you everyone

(is that too much?)

lol

--drcarl

pyrtek

drcarl wrote:

Did you airbrush him with some skin color? How DID you do what you did?

My retouch was rather simple, actually. I first created a Levels adjustment
layer and hit OK without changing anything. That might seem like a silly
thing to do, but I then changed the blending mode of the Levels adjustment
layer to Screen. This brightened up the image and brought out the man's
face. It also lightened the sky, though, so I painted over it with black on the
Levels' mask to bring it back to what it looks like in the original. Next, I
created a Selective Color adjustment layer and played around with the Reds.
I can't remember exactly what values I set, but I'm sure I reduced Black and
Yellow. Finally, I sharpened it a bit with USM. I also can't remember the
values used here, but it was something like 75 1 0, probably.

drcarl wrote:

I wonder what I'd get if I put Edge's on top of Bernard's and adjusted the transparency. That is SO cheating.

As long as you get the image you want, it's not cheating. (BTW, I tried it
and I think you should, too. I think you'll like the result.)

About edgework's retouch - it is sublime, as are a lot of his retouches. My
favourite here definitely.

kygarden

I took a 15 minute whack at it too. Didn't use Photoshop though...

And I'm no pro, just playing

drcarl

more wow
Kygarden: Nice work! Just when I thought it couldn't get any better!

Making the embers in the pipe glow a subtle little bit is a GREAT touch, too.


We do love to play. I'm so glad to know that I'm not the only one who thinks it's playing and that it's FUN...and that it's a 'game' much more rewarding than, say, crossword puzzles (with no big money jackpot for success.) Our successes get that nice big, "Ohh WOW!" that I love so much.

At first, when I viewed so many stellar images here and in a couple of other forums, I was feeling like I'd never measure up, and that it might be better to take up another interest. Now, with all the useful, practical, artistic and personalized information here...there IS hope!...I think I'll keep on shooting. (Those around me think I'm good even though I know better - shhhhh)

kygarden wrote:

Didn't use Photoshop though...

So, um, what DID you use? Excel? Word? WinAmp?

I'd be interested in the steps, too, yet.....I suppose I ought to stick to Photoshop and get good at that. PS is complicated enough. I'd hate to even imagine wanting to learn ALL the programs so that I'd know which software excels for which kinds of images - omg - as a friend advised me when I first got online in 1987, "like the Ocean, it's best if you have some idea of where you're going instead of trying to wade-in everywhere; the water's VERY deep and there's a lot of it". (Did I mention I read everything on the internet already? lol)

Bernard: right after I wrote my reply, with my sweetie on my lap, I said: "Watch this!" as I showed her how I could combine two images and adjust the transparency of the top one with the sliders. She suggested lightening-up his left iris so I played with that until it was subtle (instead of weird or spooky looking). Then, I DID finish-up by combining two images. We both sat here amazed with how great it looks...the idea came to me as a joke; the 'combined' image is NO joke, it rocks!

I might even layer-up ALL the images here and erase all but the keeper areas. I wonder if that'd work. Sounds like more fun than installing CS3 and Lightroom which I have sitting here ready to go.

I wonder if I can imbed a flash movie in the file so that I can add crawling credits (like at the end of a movie) for all that ~played~ - lol -

I love this.

THANX!

kygarden

Thanks drcarl Glad you like it. I used Nikon Capture NX. It's a a product mainly developed by Nik Software. I think Nikon bought Nik not long ago. It doesn't use layers. It uses what they call control points and you can stack them up in edit steps. The steps can be rearranged or deleted as you go. This is the software Nikon sells as the default RAW converter for Nikon NEF files, but it works with any jpg or tiff file too....and other formats if I'm not mistaken (not other cam maker's raw formats though).

I don't recall every step I made for these edits, but all I did was lighten certain parts of the photo, slightly change the color of the sky, put some red in the pipe, reduced the red in his face, bumped up the contrast a little on the shirt. Just played with it until I thought it looked pretty good.

Here's the software I use if you want to see what it's all about. I love it for it's simplicity. You don't have to learn all about layers, etc. There's no layers. But the drawback is, for now it doesn't have a cloning tool, for one thing. I wish they'd add that.
http://www.capturenx.com/

RogersDA

drcarl wrote:

Rogers: I am constantly fighting the urge (and sometimes I lose) to making some of the Art ones. Yours is bumping into The Old Man and The Sea look. Fun! I'm subjectively liking how the smoke looks on yours, and the clothing. What were your steps, generally, if you remember...
--drcarl

Sorry for the late response.

In PS:

Set the image as a layer and a tweaked to color via a separate layer to remove the a lot of the red in the face.

Merged the layers once I was happy with the result (now Layer 1)

Duplicated the layer (Layer 2), blend mode Hard Light. Applied a high pass filter.

Duplicated Layer 1 and Layer 2. Merged these to layers (renamed to Layer 3). Blend mode Luminosity, Opacity 50%

Added an Adjustment Layer - Hue/Saturation. Selected colorize and set Hue 27, Saturation 37, Lightness 0. Blend mode Luminosity, Opacity 81%.

Saved file as a PSD.

In Lightroom:

Set the exposure to -.24, Recovery 0, Fill Light 8, Blacks 13, Brightness 0, Contrast 0, Clarity 48

Reopened with PS with Lightroom adjustments and saved as jpg.

drcarl

thanx more
Thank you every one of you. I learned (and am learning) SO much.

So...here's the one my client, er, my sister likes the best. Hey, I was just messing around...experimenting with the multiply blending mode. She's more interested in the "glowey"-ness than his skin colors. Hmmm....it is kind of a fun image.

Many thanks all.

Keep shooting!

--Dr Carl