My Fi (2 portrait) project might be done... thumbs up or down?

NeilL · April 11, 2009

It's been a lot of learning from underexposed and color cast affected originals to these. Would like to know if you think I can offer them to the subject, my niece Fiona. A last doubt in my mind is the cropping. But please just write anything else you think needs attending to. Thanks!

Both shot in Melbourne in October last year with Canon 40D & 135mm f2L USM

Neil

rutt · April 11, 2009

These are nice except her eyes are either over-sharpened, or her face over-blurred or both. It doesn't look natural to me. I'd ease up on both steps.

When I do portraits, I first try to correct the flesh tones so that A>B in LAB and both are positive (with very rare exceptions which don't apply here.) Then I save a duplicate before doing anything else. You can always use this in a last step to soften anything you do afterward. Very often you'll find you've gone too far and playing with the opacity of the original layered on top of the "final" version will yield a better result.

NeilL · April 11, 2009

rutt wrote:

These are nice except her eyes are either over-sharpened, or her face over-blurred or both. It doesn't look natural to me. I'd ease up on both steps.

When I do portraits, I first try to correct the flesh tones so that A>B in LAB and both are positive (with very rare exceptions which don't apply here.) Then I save a duplicate before doing anything else. You can always use this in a last step to soften anything you do afterward. Very often you'll find you've gone too far and playing with the opacity of the original layered on top of the "final" version will yield a better result.

Thanks, rutt. Yes, I did ponder long about the eyes. It's a prejudice of mine that I like to see sharp lashes and crisp irises and whites. I actually selectively sharpened the eyes in the first pic here, and this is the one where there is a problem, I think. I will now definitely go back and soften that back.

Very interesting to read your editing technique, thanks. I don't know much about using LAB, and have never used it in editing. These were done using techniques being developed by a guy I know, and some plugin filters.

rutt · April 11, 2009

NeilL wrote:

Thanks, rutt. Yes, I did ponder long about the eyes. It's a prejudice of mine that I like to see sharp lashes and bright whites. I actually selectively sharpened the eyes in the first pic here, and this is the one where there is a problem, I think. I will now definitely go back and soften that back.

Selective sharpening is often a mistake. There are tons of better ways to do this, but if you are too selective about sharpening, it often ends up looking fake. Instead of selectively sharpening the eyes, try taking to CMYK and sharpening just the K channel. Better to come up with a strategy that avoids sharpening flesh (there is almost no K in properly exposed flesh) but will sharpen eyes, hair, etc. Using some natural aspect of the image will almost always yield more natural looking results.

NeilL wrote:

Very interesting to read your editing technique, thanks. I don't know much about using LAB, and have never used it in editing. These were done using techniques being developed by a guy I know, and some plugin filters.

You don't have to know much about LAB to get skin tones about right. Actually, I use RGB curves to do it, but consult the LAB values in the info palette. Lots of people use CMYK values instead. See this thread.

NeilL · April 11, 2009

All great info, rutt, very appreciative!

rutt wrote:

Using some natural aspect of the image will almost always yield more natural looking results.

Hey, I couldn't agree more - that's my mantra! As you know, the originals of these shots were quite low quality, and there is a case then for using filters after as much 'natural' development as possible has been done.

rutt wrote:

See this thread.

That goes way back!

I'll certainly study it! Thanks again!

In a moment, I'll post the two pics again with some adjustments along the lines of your suggestions.

NeilL · April 11, 2009

The first pic has had the selective sharpening of the eyes softened, and some film grain added to cut the skin smoothness some.

The second has had a tweak to the skin color, bring it back from yellow a ways.

Very slight adjustments, but might improve the result, do you think?

*

rutt · April 11, 2009

Eyes still look fake to me. Did you blur the skin? Maybe the combination of blurring and sharpening is what looks wrong. You want the minimal amount of sharpening that gets the job done. Or the maximal amount that doesn't look artificial. But it's like a magic trick. If your audience sees what you are doing, the magic is gone.

NeilL · April 12, 2009

rutt wrote:

Eyes still look fake to me. Did you blur the skin? Maybe the combination of blurring and sharpening is what looks wrong. You want the minimal amount of sharpening that gets the job done. Or the maximal amount that doesn't look artificial. But it's like a magic trick. If your audience sees what you are doing, the magic is gone.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Here are the jpgs of the RAW conversion tifs. As you can see, as far as skin smoothness and eye area sharpness there's not too great a difference from the final versions above. The main problems as I described were underexposure and color cast.

divamum · April 12, 2009

Hey Neil -

How've you been doing the skin work - are you using a blur layer, or ...?

I actually really like her skin in the first "original" shot - it's small, so I can't tell if she has blemishes you were correcting or not, but I do like what appears to be the hint of freckles, and in your final, retouched image, those are gone.

I'm sure there are better ways, but I've found in my bumbling trial and error way that I like the results of skin work best when I use a very low opacity cloning brush on a separate layer (so I can further adjust it as I choose) - I usually use a fairly large brush, with opacity anything between 3-18% depending on the actual look of the image, colours etc. I also use the healing brush at pretty high magnification, keeping the brush only JUST bigger than what I'm using it to heal (that trick is from the dgrin skin-retouching tutorial, which is well worth a read if you haven't already).

The other trick which I'm loving is Scott Kelby's advice to deal with undereye shadows and wrinkles by using the cloning brush with the blend sent to LIGHTEN. This is one of the greatest tricks ever - combined with the super-low opacity brush in normal, the results seem to be very natural looking and although I will sometimes use surface and gaussian blur layers for heavy retouching, it never looks as natural as doing it "the hard way" with the cloning and healing brushes.

It's time consuming, but I've been very pleased with the results - you can see what I've done in some of my recent headshots examples here.

Just my still-learnin' 2c. I think these are beautiful shots - regardless of how you finish processing them, they're very sweet images of a beautiful girl!

rutt · April 12, 2009

My treatment is a lot different than yours so you may not like it. I like to bring out the big facial structures without making skin details too evident. But I was careful when sharpening to do just enough but not too much. Since the eyes are already sharp and have good catchlights, less is more. I used the blend-if sliders to limit the sharpening to the non-yellow and darker areas, thus avoiding the skin.

NeilL · April 14, 2009

divamum wrote:

Hey Neil -

How've you been doing the skin work - are you using a blur layer, or ...?

I actually really like her skin in the first "original" shot - it's small, so I can't tell if she has blemishes you were correcting or not, but I do like what appears to be the hint of freckles, and in your final, retouched image, those are gone.

I'm sure there are better ways, but I've found in my bumbling trial and error way that I like the results of skin work best when I use a very low opacity cloning brush on a separate layer (so I can further adjust it as I choose) - I usually use a fairly large brush, with opacity anything between 3-18% depending on the actual look of the image, colours etc. I also use the healing brush at pretty high magnification, keeping the brush only JUST bigger than what I'm using it to heal (that trick is from the dgrin skin-retouching tutorial, which is well worth a read if you haven't already).

The other trick which I'm loving is Scott Kelby's advice to deal with undereye shadows and wrinkles by using the cloning brush with the blend sent to LIGHTEN. This is one of the greatest tricks ever - combined with the super-low opacity brush in normal, the results seem to be very natural looking and although I will sometimes use surface and gaussian blur layers for heavy retouching, it never looks as natural as doing it "the hard way" with the cloning and healing brushes.

It's time consuming, but I've been very pleased with the results - you can see what I've done in some of my recent headshots examples here.

Just my still-learnin' 2c. I think these are beautiful shots - regardless of how you finish processing them, they're very sweet images of a beautiful girl!

Thanks very much for all the info (and the nice compliments).

I like your shots in the link. They have a more personal-direct feel than these of Fi. The processing is very quality...

although, rutt is right I think about the magenta cast in yours, and I think his redo brings out the best in that one he did, and that one does have a huge lot already right there in it!

Yes, Fi does have some freckles. But two things, she had makeup on her face so the freckles didn't stand much of a chance

, and underexposure is the key to the Pandora's Box of digital images, and part of what you see in the originals are artifacts. These are what rutt's redo accentuates.

That she went to trouble to makeup the way she did is a clue that she had in mind something with a little glamor in the photos. So I had to acknowledge that in my rescuing-processing them. Unlike your model who is au natural, and very pleasingly so.

A bit like a lush instrumental accompaniment versus a capella, or polyphony versus organum.

Each shot is a challenge!

NeilL · April 14, 2009

rutt wrote:

My treatment is a lot different than yours so you may not like it. I like to bring out the big facial structures without making skin details too evident. But I was careful when sharpening to do just enough but not too much. Since the eyes are already sharp and have good catchlights, less is more. I used the blend-if sliders to limit the sharpening to the non-yellow and darker areas, thus avoiding the skin.

Thanks for this. I take the point you are making with it, and I'm grateful for the trouble you've taken to help me see the wood from the trees - this face is so familiar to me, and the shots I've been looking at for months, a fresh pair of critical eyes was the dose I needed to see them differently.

I certainly now see the artificiality in them. But you've given me a new decision to make - to keep that in them, more or less?

When you start with defective originals like these you find you can run up against a wall pretty smart some things you try. So it's a matter of going where the defects let you go without adding to the problems you already have. This is a kind of version of that mantra we were talking about - using what the material gives you, but this time the material is very limited and limiting.

Thanks for the hint about 'blend-if'!

rutt · April 14, 2009

About those eyes... I wonder whether there was already some in-camera sharpening in your originals? If so, that could explain a lot. A second sharpening pass on top of the in-camera sharpening will noticeably oversharpen, especially where the first pass made a difference (those eyes.)

So once again, take it very easy and get just enough to give the effect. You can use a high radius low amount sharpening pass which will give a lot of clarity without oversharpening fine details.

NeilL · April 14, 2009

rutt wrote:

About those eyes... I wonder whether there was already some in-camera sharpening in your originals? If so, that could explain a lot. A second sharpening pass on top of the in-camera sharpening will noticeably oversharpen, especially where the first pass made a difference (those eyes.)

So once again, take it very easy and get just enough to give the effect. You can use a high radius low amount sharpening pass which will give a lot of clarity without oversharpening fine details.

Understand.

In RAW to tif conversion (I use DPP latest) I always switch off all sharpening and NR, and engage CA @ 100.

I used the High Pass filter on Overlay (or Soft Light, not sure?) for the eyes area, reduced opacity and further softened using a filter in PhotoTools.

I'm gonna softproof and then adjust so I get the right amount of contrast to make sure the features (eyes and the rest) are not too strong/not strong enough.

NeilL · April 16, 2009

For divamum and rutt
Well, I've made some *minute* adjustments, being afraid to lose the good things, yet acknowledging your crits. I don't think either of you will be much happier, but divamum if you look @ >50% you will see some freckles peeping through, and rutt they are a few degrees less fake, and they pass the softproof test.

PS The color of the backgrounds does not help, and ideally I should make them white. If you reduce the background by scrolling halfway down the images you will see how much more natural looking the skin is. It's a trick of perception.

Neil

My Fi (2 portrait) project might be done... thumbs up or down?

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