Help me get the color right

DavidTO · November 13, 2005

My cousin asked me to shoot her family for her holiday cards. I don't know which shot she's gonna pick, but I picked this one. I want to make sure that I've made the color as good as possible for it.

Below you will find the original RAW conversion and then my tweaks.

How'd I do? Is it too saturated? Does it look real? I had to mask his face separately, since his face is redder than the rest of his family.

Anyway, give me your opinions, please! (Getting a good shot with grumpy kids was HARD!)

RAW Conversion:

Corrected in LAB:

I haven't sharpened or done any touch-up yet, just color. If you see something other than color, please let me know. Below are the links to the Originals:

Original RAW Conversion

Original Corrected

gus · November 14, 2005

I dont know much at all mate but your corrected shot looks fine to me. You did well

Carefull not to overthink stuff.

Gus

Andy · November 14, 2005

Very pleasing color.
Nice.

ginger_55 · November 14, 2005

No clue, the little girl's expression is priceless. And you are, next to Rutt, the color expert by now!

I would crop the photo, but that is just me, and I am not usually a cropper, so you may have a reason for how it is. Good family photo! Difficult to please relatives, much easier to please "clients", IMO.

ginger

ginger_55 · November 14, 2005

I couldn't resist. I know you must have used LAB, I just took up the second photo, the finished one, and I used the RGB white eyedropper on the white shirt on the girl. Brightened it up, which I liked, it is all subjective, and by brightening, I got rid of what yellow was bothering me, again subjective. Some would say that it needs that color. I just left it as was with the eyedropper tweak in RGB, then I cropped it a bit, just for the hell of it. I liked the balance of the tree on my left. By leaving a hint of that in, it put the family off center, but brought them out a bit, IMO.

ginger

Sam · November 14, 2005

David,

Getting skin tones right, and other colors right can be very difficult, so please don't missunderstand my comments.

On my monitor the corrected version seems to have too much yellow / green in the skin tone. Also if the husband in real life has a redder complection, wouldn't you want to keep that difference, or at lease some of it?

Unfortunetly I have no magic tricks to help, I too stuggle with these issues.

Good luck.

Sam

rutt · November 14, 2005

This is a surprisingly difficult image. Each of the four subjects have different skin tones and they don't all like to be treated alike. The boy's face badly needs to be reconstructed and in fact they can all use more facial detail. Getting this back without leaving artifacts is challenging.

Here is my attempt:

Original size here.

Geez, what did I do? Essentially, I followed Dan Margulis' portrait recipe from chapter 16 of the LAB book, but it was a lot more like his last example which requires lots of variations and fiddling around. So:

Shadow/highlight in RGB mode to recover some of the highlight detais on the boy's face.
Inspect the channels for one with best facial detail. Usually this is the green channel, but in this case the boy's face is so light and so badly in need of depth that it was far better in the blue channel.
Make a layer containing the blue channel.
Convert to LAB via "Convert to profile" no dither, no flatten.
Fuss with the blending options of the blue channel layer to exclude as much as possible except the faces. Split the sliders very wide to lower opacity in places where it darkens the most. Fuss with opacity. This blue channel luminosity blend is powerful medicine and needs to be applied with great care.
Flatten.
Make two duplicate layers, call them A Overlay and B Overlay with A overlay stacked on top of B overlay stacked on top of the background. Change the blending options for A overlay so it only blends the A channel by unchecking the boxes for "Blend L" and "Blend B".
Apply Image A channel to A channel of the A overlay layer in overlay mode.
Ditto, B channel to B channel of B overlay layer in overlay mode.
Dial back opacity of the A Overlay layer until the man and woman's face have roughly equal magenta and yellow. She ends up a little more yellow, since he might have a sunburn or something on his forhead. The children are quite yellow in the shadows on their faces.
Merge down the overlay layers and play with the opacity. At this point less opacity gives less saturation and especially warmth on the faces. I used about 70%.
Make a duplicate layer of the background stacked in the middle. Apply Image to apply the A channel to itself in overlay mode on this layer. Set to blend only A. I used this to get some more magenta into the overly yellow shadows on the children's faces and also some pink into their cheeks. So let's call it the "Pink Cheek Layer".
Add a layer mask to the pink cheek layer, hide all. Use a very soft, largish brush at 50% opacity to paint white on the layer mask and reveal some pink cheeks and get ride of some the yellow facial shadows. The effect will be very subtle since this is stacked under the 70% opacity layer which was the result of the first set of overlay blends. That's good, since you don't have to be good with a tablet to do it (I am not.)
Flatten.
Conventional L channel USM sharpening, but now I use a new trick. Load an inverted L channel as a selection first so the effect is greater on the darker parts of the image, particularly eyes and hair, and avoids skin, in this case particularly the adults' skin. We don't want to make the woman look older or exagerate the man's 5 o'clock shadow. Make sure to deselect afterwards.
High radius L sharpening to add more depth to the faces and general contrast. I ended up with 60/12/6.
Whew!

After all that work, I hope it looks better than David's or Ginger's. I've looked at it too long, so it's hard for me to tell anymore.

Here's the thing. I'm just back from spending 3 12+ hour days with the master, Dan Margulis in his Advanced Theory Class. These things are marathons designed to change completely and forever the way one approaches color correction. That part works. I came away with hundreds of new tools. But it takes a while for it to all settle down and work well in harmony. At some point in the mastering of these techniques, it becomes possible to do just about anything with an image. Then comes the really hard part: deciding how much actually to do.

rutt · November 14, 2005

Oh, and can someone who is actually good at it photoshop away those incredibly annoying high fashion pointy toed boots she is wearing? I think these things are the ugliest thing the fashion world has foisted off on women since those padded shoulders in the 80s. It's the wicked witch of the west effect.

DavidTO · November 14, 2005

Thanks all for the comments.

Rutt, that's gonna take a while to digest. There's few images that I would spend that much time on, but I do want to fully understand it so that I have it in my arsenal.

Here's another shot that I took that they like. Maybe not so challenging as far as skin tones.

rutt · November 14, 2005

I like this one a lot better, wish I'd seen it first. Those stupid pointed shoe toes aren't so obvious.

David, this is like cooking. I started with Dan's basic portrait recipe from chapter 16. It's only a few steps. You can just read it. But this isn't just a head and shoulders portrait so there was a lot of work to target different corrections at the different faces. Dan has an even more challenging shot at the end of chapter 16 which I worked on in his class last week (and 3-way tied for first, though I have to admit that Dan's was much better.) See the girl with the sun on her face in the flowers.

I'm going to write up the basic portrait recipe in the next day or so and that will be the right place to start. In this case, I was just trying to help out a friend (and show off a little, I admit.)

But how does it look? Be blunt? It's the cold hard truth that these classes famously leave the students more than a little confused until it all settles down. Honest feedback is really really good at this point.

ginger_55 · November 14, 2005

I like Rutt's verson.....

It helps the boy kid so much.

ginger

rutt · November 14, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

Thanks all for the comments.

Rutt, that's gonna take a while to digest. There's few images that I would spend that much time on, but I do want to fully understand it so that I have it in my arsenal.

Here's another shot that I took that they like. Maybe not so challenging as far as skin tones.

David, is this an original, or have you already worked on it? That patch of sun on the man's face might be the result of an "Impossible Retouch" ala chapter 8.

ginger_55 · November 14, 2005

I just can't shut up, but since you so pointedly said that you hoped it looks better than mine of David's................. and besides I am waiting to hear on my camera so I am ill (southern speak).

I like what you did, Rutt, except with the man. For some reason he looks a bit plastic to me.

You know I would never ever wear those boots, yet I didn't notice them, and they don't bother me. I like the first photo, the one WE have been working on, best. Actually, I did so little, just lightened it. Lightening it, naturally, helped the yellow cast that was bothering me, as it was also lightened.

I do like what you did, in general, Rutt! And whatever is bothering me about the man, well, they would never, ever, in a gazillion years notice it, unless it is not flattering.

ginger

rutt · November 14, 2005

ginger_55 wrote:

I like what you did, Rutt, except with the man. For some reason he looks a bit plastic to me.

Look at him full sized first. But I think you might be seening the blue blend with the wide split sliders. The range of those sliders crosses his face.

If this image were really worth spending a day on, say it were David's first magazine cover or these people's XMAS card and they were willing to pay, then I'd make a mask and use the blue layer for the boy's face and some blend of blue and green for everyone else's. I played a bit, but nailing it would take real time.

DavidTO · November 14, 2005

rutt wrote:

David, is this an original, or have you already worked on it? That patch of sun on the man's face might be the result of an "Impossible Retouch" ala chapter 8.

It was blown and I did the impossible...

The original original is here.

warszawski · November 14, 2005

"precise" cropping (?)
... better late than never ....
my edit is based essentially on "precise" cropping (?) (what was initially suggested by ginger_55 then some LAB steeping and finaly duplicate layer with multiply and low opacity in RGB before posting... :-)

DavidTO · November 14, 2005

warszawski wrote:

... better late than never ....
my edit is based essentially on "precise" cropping (?) (what was initially suggested by ginger_55 then some LAB steeping and finaly duplicate layer with multiply and low opacity in RGB before posting... :-)

Yeah, I haven't cropped it yet. Reckon I should sooner than later, though, huh?

Help me get the color right

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