Two of my daughters Angelo. Experimenting with lighting and doing portraits. Apparently I still have not gotten it just right. Back to the drawing board.
I like the color best in this case. I don't know enough about lighting to know how it should be.
I mean, I know somethings, but I liked the photos, and the lightening was not a factor for me. However it could be a difference in monitors. My monitor seems to have been darker lately.
In the black and white, I do think that there was not enough depth of feeling of blacks and whites to complement the photo. It just kind of sat blah, IMO. Maybe a different technique with black and white.
Except that I do think it makes a fine color photo.
Beautiful subjects Max , but I have to agree with Angelo. The lighting on your oldest daughter could be more even. I believe this problem carries over to the B&W version as well. Between the 2, I'd pick the B&W. But, I'd really choose a re-shoot if that's possible. Plus, your little one seems to be squinting a little (like she's waiting for the flash, so she can close her eyes...lol)
These 2 are too cute to not "practice" on them every weekend.....
This seems to be another example of taking an image to B&W as a fix for bad color. I'll bet this image was shot under tungsten (incandescent) and not properly white balanced either in the camera or during raw conversion. This is a very common disease and often people don't recognize that they have it. It makes the people look they are on a bad old TV that has the color saturation turned up too high.
Fortunately, it is bith diagnosable and curable. The diagnostic instrument is the color sampler (eye dropper tool). Set your info palette options to show CMYK and sample some ponts on the flesh. The tell tale sign is very high yellow and magenta relative to cyan. In this image there is almost no cyan in the flesh. For caucasian people, cyan should be about between 70 to 80% of the magenta and yellow which should be close to even.
The easiest cure is availble if you shot in raw. Is so, just set the white balence to tungsten during conversion. I'll assume you didn't shoot raw.
For jpegs, a cure is to use LAB curves to rebalance the color. But as has already been noted the little girl's face looks pretty flat. So the first thing I did was apply the good old cure for flat looking faces.
Then I converted to LAB and flattened the A and B curves on the magenta and yellow sides respectively to correct for the hot tungsten lighting:
While I was at it I increased the contrast to bring out more detail in the faces. The shot was actually a little light, so moving the ligh endpoint in mom and apple pie. Moving the dark endpont in does lose some detail in the woman's hair, but also adds drama and gives us a true shadow. All in all, a good trade off.
The moves in the A+B channels may have fixed the color balance for the people but they left me with a light cyan background which might have been right (probably was) but which I found unattractive. I fixed with "Replace Color":
When you do this at home, you'll do it all before you apply the white frame. But I was looking at this ugly institutional green frame, so just for fun I used "Replace Color" again to recover the white of the frame:
The girl's face still looked a little flat, so I made a trip to CMYK and steepend the K curve through the area of her faces. Children's faces in bright light should have very little black, but what black there is adds crucial definition to facial features. By steepening just the very highlight, I narrowly targeted thsi and avoided adding to the woman's dark tan.
Here is what I really think. On the first shot, it is just too bright, and I am sure that it is warmer than it should be. Some of this is a matter of taste.
Rutt's interpretation bothers me a bit. I will see what I can do. I do agree with Rutt that in this case, black and white is not the answer. We do not often agree on that.
I will play with it as I am bored, and I really like the shot. But you are the one who must be pleased in the end.
Rutt's interpretation bothers me a bit. I will see what I can do. I do agree with Rutt that in this case, black and white is not the answer. We do not often agree on that.
My interpretation or my cure? The diagnosis has a 90% probability of being correct. It was shot under tungsten without proper white balance (unless there was something bad done in post.)
As to the cure, there are a million variations on the choices I made depending on the goal. My goal was just to explain a procudure to acheive passably realistic color. I got a reasonable image as a side effect and proof of concept. I hope Imax will try something on his own now that he understands what is wrong with the color shot.
Oh, I did do something I didn't explain. I ran the sharpening tool over the woman's jewlery and the girl's eyes. For a full sized original with large prints in its future, do this with a light hand.
I wasn't sure how he shot it, I did not know for a fact that it was shot under tungsten, though it was definitely warm (orangish). The first thing I did was go to saturation/hue/lightness and move the saturation down a bit as the color really hurt my eyes, I could not see the color for the brightness. This one has been taken down in saturation to about a -20 to 24. The reason I am not sure as I made three variations, this is the least saturated. Then I went to the filters and used the cooling filter, the one that said (80) and used it at a density of only 10%. I happen to like warm colors, it is really a matter of preference, IMO, and once I got the saturation down, the warm color was down, too. So when I put the cooling filter on, I moved the slider til I liked it, someone else might like it differently.
I was trying a bit to make the colors more even. The older sisters was so much darker than her little sister. Here I did not do much, but I then played with it in black and white and I did use shadows/highlights trying to even them up. g
Ginger, using shadow/highlight was probably a good idea. Your colors won't print right, though. It will look much too light and red. There is too much magenta and too little yellow and cyan. Maybe in your language, you didn't cool enough. You can't trust your eyes for work like this, you have to look at the numbers.
Yes, thanks Rutt. I thought I should check the numbers after I had the photo here. I was tired, knew I was getting up early, busy day, so I closed up and went to bed.
I might check the numbers for fun. I have been taught by Baldy that there should be more yellow than Magenta, he never mentions cyan. I thought last night that might have been what bothered me re your photo, the cyan, more than I am used to. Something about the color bothered me. This is so individual.
There is the photo with the yellow to magenta correct. Where did you get the info about cyan? I wish Baldy would weigh in. It always kills me to put the yellow into a photo, I would be in my grave if I put cyan in, but if Baldy says so........
Actually, he didn't say it wouldn't print right, he said that every human being needs more yellow than magenta to look "human". Otherwise it prints true, but people don't like it as well. I think I do remember a case where his daughter preferred the magenta. I don't print anything, if I did it would be birds, so I have not experienced this phenomenon.
This is the difference. The top one is correct with the yellow, the bottom one has a bit too little yellow compared to the magenta.
If I just look at the top one, it gets to looking pretty good. If I compare them, I still like the lower one. (I don't have any color ink or I would print it.)
Ginger, you don't need Baldy. Go right to his source and mine. Dan Margulis, Professional Photoshop, 4th edition, page 39:
Except in small children and other very light-skinned persons, yellow is always higher than magenta in fleshtones. Cyan is always at least a fith of the magenta value. As skin toe gets darkyer, these imbalances increase. A dark skinned individual may have a third more yellow than magenta, and cyan a third the strength of the magenta.
There is more detail starting in page 23.
Let me say it again, you can't use only your eyes for this. If you don't go entirely by the numbers, you at least have to be aware of them and deviate from correct parctice only for very good and well understood reasons.
Thanks for the input Rytt and Ginger. You guys make this stuff look easy to do. I'm just glad that these are my kids and I can practice with the camera. I'll have to pick up a copy of that book tonight at work. Hopefully the library at the college I do some work at has it. Here are a couple of more that I took. Rutt, you were right. The previous photos were not set properly, the white balance was off and they wre not taken in raw. Here are several that I took this morning that I think came out better. What do you think?
Wild Thing
Just Woke Up
Peaceful Siblings
Didn't Last
Attention!
Once again, thanks for the help. Thanks for looking!
Comments
the light variant from the women's chin to her forehead is significant and is evident in both versions. can you adjust this a bit?
two beautiful people. who are they?
Moderator of: Location, Location, Location , Mind Your Own Business & Other Cool Shots
I mean, I know somethings, but I liked the photos, and the lightening was not a factor for me. However it could be a difference in monitors. My monitor seems to have been darker lately.
In the black and white, I do think that there was not enough depth of feeling of blacks and whites to complement the photo. It just kind of sat blah, IMO. Maybe a different technique with black and white.
Except that I do think it makes a fine color photo.
ginger
These 2 are too cute to not "practice" on them every weekend.....
Thanks for sharing,
Steve
My vote is for the Black and White.
kc7dji
TML Photography
tmlphoto.com
Fortunately, it is bith diagnosable and curable. The diagnostic instrument is the color sampler (eye dropper tool). Set your info palette options to show CMYK and sample some ponts on the flesh. The tell tale sign is very high yellow and magenta relative to cyan. In this image there is almost no cyan in the flesh. For caucasian people, cyan should be about between 70 to 80% of the magenta and yellow which should be close to even.
The easiest cure is availble if you shot in raw. Is so, just set the white balence to tungsten during conversion. I'll assume you didn't shoot raw.
For jpegs, a cure is to use LAB curves to rebalance the color. But as has already been noted the little girl's face looks pretty flat. So the first thing I did was apply the good old cure for flat looking faces.
Then I converted to LAB and flattened the A and B curves on the magenta and yellow sides respectively to correct for the hot tungsten lighting:
While I was at it I increased the contrast to bring out more detail in the faces. The shot was actually a little light, so moving the ligh endpoint in mom and apple pie. Moving the dark endpont in does lose some detail in the woman's hair, but also adds drama and gives us a true shadow. All in all, a good trade off.
The moves in the A+B channels may have fixed the color balance for the people but they left me with a light cyan background which might have been right (probably was) but which I found unattractive. I fixed with "Replace Color":
When you do this at home, you'll do it all before you apply the white frame. But I was looking at this ugly institutional green frame, so just for fun I used "Replace Color" again to recover the white of the frame:
The girl's face still looked a little flat, so I made a trip to CMYK and steepend the K curve through the area of her faces. Children's faces in bright light should have very little black, but what black there is adds crucial definition to facial features. By steepening just the very highlight, I narrowly targeted thsi and avoided adding to the woman's dark tan.
Voila:
I am not serious.
Here is what I really think. On the first shot, it is just too bright, and I am sure that it is warmer than it should be. Some of this is a matter of taste.
Rutt's interpretation bothers me a bit. I will see what I can do. I do agree with Rutt that in this case, black and white is not the answer. We do not often agree on that.
I will play with it as I am bored, and I really like the shot. But you are the one who must be pleased in the end.
ginger
My interpretation or my cure? The diagnosis has a 90% probability of being correct. It was shot under tungsten without proper white balance (unless there was something bad done in post.)
As to the cure, there are a million variations on the choices I made depending on the goal. My goal was just to explain a procudure to acheive passably realistic color. I got a reasonable image as a side effect and proof of concept. I hope Imax will try something on his own now that he understands what is wrong with the color shot.
I was trying a bit to make the colors more even. The older sisters was so much darker than her little sister. Here I did not do much, but I then played with it in black and white and I did use shadows/highlights trying to even them up. g
I might check the numbers for fun. I have been taught by Baldy that there should be more yellow than Magenta, he never mentions cyan. I thought last night that might have been what bothered me re your photo, the cyan, more than I am used to. Something about the color bothered me. This is so individual.
ginger
Actually, he didn't say it wouldn't print right, he said that every human being needs more yellow than magenta to look "human". Otherwise it prints true, but people don't like it as well. I think I do remember a case where his daughter preferred the magenta. I don't print anything, if I did it would be birds, so I have not experienced this phenomenon.
This is the difference. The top one is correct with the yellow, the bottom one has a bit too little yellow compared to the magenta.
If I just look at the top one, it gets to looking pretty good. If I compare them, I still like the lower one. (I don't have any color ink or I would print it.)
This coffee sure tastes good.
morning,
ginger
There is more detail starting in page 23.
Let me say it again, you can't use only your eyes for this. If you don't go entirely by the numbers, you at least have to be aware of them and deviate from correct parctice only for very good and well understood reasons.
ginger (going for more coffee)
Thanks again.
http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone
If you read this first, you'll be able to see what's going on with your shots.