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krilac
Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
i've been checking out the site all day and figured this was the perfect place to come for color correction help 
i can't get the color right on this picture - it's way too green (i think?) and i can't find the original file - i must have accidentally deleted it (groan). so i'm trying to correct a copy of the original picture. do i just give up or can anyone give me pointers? (i have photoshop and am learning curves).
thanks!
kristin
http://goldscher.smugmug.com
i can't get the color right on this picture - it's way too green (i think?) and i can't find the original file - i must have accidentally deleted it (groan). so i'm trying to correct a copy of the original picture. do i just give up or can anyone give me pointers? (i have photoshop and am learning curves).thanks!
kristin
http://goldscher.smugmug.com
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I moved your post to a forum that is all about post processing and color correcting images. You'll get more of what you want out of this post here in this forum.
Welcome! And enjoy what we have. You'll get lots of great advice, feedback and community here on dgrin....
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First of all, you should make sure you read smugmug's advice on color correction as it's quite helpful.
There are a lot of different approaches here. Here's how I look at this photo. First, i wondered if maybe the girl's shirt should be a neutral white. When you look at it in pure RGB, you see values like R=198,G=197,B=217. So, it appears like there too much blue. So, first thing I did was just pull up a curve and drag the right side of the blue curve down until I got (198,197,198). As I suspected, that makes the shirt neutral, but did not fix the face. OK, either the shirt isn't actually neutral in real life or the face has some different lighting on it or the color cast is different for highlights vs. mid-tones.
Next, I put a couple sample points on the girls face using the color sampler tool and set them to display in CMYK values. I see values like: C=18%, M=30%, Y=59%, K=0% and C=15%, M=35%, Y=82%, K=0%.
Everything looks pretty good except, as you suspected, the Yellow is just too high. For skin like this, we'd like to see it only about 30% more than the Magenta, not >100% more. At this point there are a ton of different ways to just reduce the yellow. The easiest way I know of to just bring the Yellow down is to switch into CMYK mode and just use a Yellow curve so that's what I did here.
Image/Mode/CMYK. Create this curve below that gives me values of C=18%, M=29%, Y=40%, K=0% and C=15%, M=35%, Y=56%, K=0% for the same sample points. This may not actually be the best shaped curve, but it accomplishes the right thing in the mid-tones without hurting the highlights. You might also want to experiement with a curve that leaves the end points as they are, but changes the mid-tones. You can experiment with the shape of the curve that gives you the most optimized result. Since I have such a small sample here, I didn't spend time trying to optimize the shape of the curve. Hopefully you can see the general technique.
And that produced this image which looks (to me) a lot better:
Finally, I flattened and switched back to RGB.
As I said above, there are many other ways to do color correction, but since this was purely off in the Yellow, I thought it was easiest to just use a Yellow curve. Perhaps others will chime in with other ways to accomplish the same goal while staying in RGB (selective color perhaps).
P.S. If you really wanted to get fancy, you can see in this image that the magenta is too strong in the shadows, but OK in the mid-tones so you'd add a Magenta curve that lowers (e.g. birghtens) the magenta in the shadows, but doesn't effect the mid-tones or highlights.
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