Please teach me to correct this

Sonya

Hello all from a rank amateur newbie in need of your expert guidance

This photo was taken in fluorescent lighting indoors with a Canon powershot S3IS on one of the auto settings (portrait). Its turned out really horrible. Trouble is, this was her second birthday, and I rather wanted to salvage it if possible, but I don't even know where to start. Can you help please?



Note: Image to be used only for this forum and nowhere else, for whatever purpose

i_worship_the_King

sure, why not.
Here's what I've got so far (I decided to quit and go to bed, it's 1.45 or something.)



Let me start by saying that I haven't actually seen this setting so I was just winging on what I thought the colors should be. And I'm still a little new to this, but EVERYTHING I know came from dGrin tutes and hours of toying with shots.

Here's what I did (you should REALLY look at the tutorials. While I'll give you my steps, the gruesome details are all locked up there in the tutes.)

1> Used the threshold to locate white/black points.
2> Ran Levels on new adjustment layer
3> to me the photo was a little overexposed, so I did a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, lowering brightness a bit (7 i think) and upping the contrast a bit (15 i think)
4> The rest of the pic was looking a lot better, but I didn't like the hot spot on her cheek. Broke out the burn tool (like 30% opacity) and burn the cheek and nose a little. Also put a small elipse around the whole cheek area and blurred just a little bit (mostly to cover up my work).
5> pretty pleased with the face & dress I went to work on the colors. Pulled up hue/saturation new adjustment layer and played until I liked the rustic gold color of the drapery and the skin tones.
6> zoomed in I noticed the pearls. broke out a Usharp mask filter (on the pic layer) and played with the settings until i got a sharpness i liked.
7> after all this I didn't like the color of the balloons (I can never get deep true reds and such on my camera... or maybe it's my monitor!) but I wanted to see what i could do with those. So i used the magic wand and shift+elipse select to select just the balloons. new adjustment layer->hue/saturation. Red channel only, lowered the hue value (to a deeper red) then bumped the saturation.
8> All these wonderful tools had done a lot to accentuate the noise & artifacts throughout the photo. Ran noise cleaner-upper at med-high setting (oh yea, this was why i blurred the cheek - the noise tool screwed it up for some reason).
9> save, upload, post.

oh yea, and WELCOME TO dGrin! Hopefully you can trudge through all that stuff. I also tried just painting over the balloons (to get rid of the noise) but wasn't liking the results.


Hopefully you'll get something out of all this... best of luck!
~Matt

FULL RES:http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee292/i_worship_the_king/practicelv1fix-1.jpg

BinaryFx

Sonya, what software do you have and what don't you like about the shot?

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

jfriend

Sonya wrote:

Hello all from a rank amateur newbie in need of your expert guidance

This photo was taken in fluorescent lighting indoors with a Canon powershot S3IS on one of the auto settings (portrait). Its turned out really horrible. Trouble is, this was her second birthday, and I rather wanted to salvage it if possible, but I don't even know where to start. Can you help please?


Note: Image to be used only for this forum and nowhere else, for whatever purpose

Here's some ideas to consider:

• Highlight adjustment to bring down the tone in her dress so we can see more detail and it doesn't dominate the scene
• Shadow adjustment to bring out a little more detail in her face and hair
• Overall brightness curve to add contrast
• Slight color tweak with a blue curve (there are few known color references in the scene so it's hard for us to know what colors are right)
• HIRALOAM sharpening (USM with high radius, low amount) to improve both sharpening and contrast
• Smart sharpen
• Crop

And, here are two different crops:


Compared to your original in the same crop as the first one:


And a copy of the curves I used:

i_worship_the_King

^ wait, it's a pink dress? I thought it was white

Sonya

Thanks
I apologize for being so late in replying. My net access is erratic, and I hadn't been able to take the time out to write before.

Matt, thanks. You are right, there are no reference colours. The curtains were a sort of pale golden colour, less reddish than what you see in the image, and the dress was pale pink with pink embroidery, maybe a shade darker than what you see. Now that I say all this, I think maybe the photo has a light reddish cast? You did a good job without knowing these - the new colours are nice too! I liked the way you bumped up the balloons - they are pretty now. The original was orange I believe, but I like the reddish better. I didn't like the shadow from her temple to the jawline and that seems to have been slightly accentuated now. So I learnt two new things here already - the trick about changing the balloon hue and that I can, if I try, find a colour cast. Yea! I could be wrong though

Stephen, I have PS6 on a low end laptop, and occasionally have access to PS CS2 on a Dell desktop with 19inch screen which is where I saw this one. What I didn't like about it chiefly was the sort of multicoloured noise - all red and green and yellow in the skin, especially the shadows. I upoaded the original sized image, but somehow it looked worse on my machine than it does now (am back on the laptop). The face looked blotchy with the temple shadow specially. Image could be sharper. I tried a basic colour saturation, and USM but didn't like the increase in this sort of colour noise - I was originally aiming to make a smudge painting but the multiple colours were so prominent then! And I keep thinking, but could not be sure about the colour cast: whether it is there, and if so, which? I don't really know - something is not right which I can't identify

John, that is a lot better, thanks. In fact, almost perfect. But if you see the second crop, it will show exactly what I mean by blotchy skin - everywhere - it sort of like the skin is made of lots of coloured dots, not smooth at all. Why did it happen I wonder? The light in that area was not great, but the flash worked. I used to have a Sony 2MB before, and that worked better for me I think!

pyrtek

Apart from a simple layers correction, I used noise reduction on the skin to
make it smoother. I hope this is what you meant:

wxwax

I don't think is a complicated issue.

The image is somewhat underexposed. And it needs a bit more contrast.

I did a simple autocolor adjustment using IrfanView (a free utility) and while it's not perfect, I think it's a lot better. I also reduced the saturation a bit. I think her face is much improved.

i_worship_the_King

i think we need a few correctly exposed (exposed like you're going for) to know what the skin tone should be. At least I do anyway. It's come to my attention that I was shooting for something considerably darker than everyone else, when we might all be just shooting in the dark until we get a reference point.

Sonya

Ok, will find some properly exposed shots and post those. Take a little while though - it is festival time here.

BinaryFx

Sonya wrote:

Stephen, I have PS6 on a low end laptop, and occasionally have access to PS CS2 on a Dell desktop with 19inch screen which is where I saw this one. What I didn't like about it chiefly was the sort of multicoloured noise - all red and green and yellow in the skin, especially the shadows. I upoaded the original sized image, but somehow it looked worse on my machine than it does now (am back on the laptop). The face looked blotchy with the temple shadow specially. Image could be sharper. I tried a basic colour saturation, and USM but didn't like the increase in this sort of colour noise - I was originally aiming to make a smudge painting but the multiple colours were so prominent then! And I keep thinking, but could not be sure about the colour cast: whether it is there, and if so, which? I don't really know - something is not right which I can't identify

Sonya...

Colour noise:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_colourblur.html


Cast Inspection/Correction:

Info to come (this placeholder text will be updated when I have time).


Sincerely,

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