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Thanks, Rutt
DavidTO
Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 19,160 Major grins
Well, this isn't the best image in the world, but she's my daughter, and I like it.
Anyway, here it is straight from RAW conversion (Capture One)
And here it is after using Rutt's sharpening tutorial, and steepening the a and b curves in LAB:
and finally, after using Shadow/Highlights as suggested by Rutt:
Just wish her left eye was in focus. The sharpening is subtle on the web display, but I think it helped at higher resolution. The color's got more pop from the curves work I did on the a and be channels, but most noticeable is the recovered highlights on her cheek, lower right in the frame. I've never taken the time to figure out that dang shadows/highlights thing....glad I did.
Anyway, here it is straight from RAW conversion (Capture One)
And here it is after using Rutt's sharpening tutorial, and steepening the a and b curves in LAB:
and finally, after using Shadow/Highlights as suggested by Rutt:
Just wish her left eye was in focus. The sharpening is subtle on the web display, but I think it helped at higher resolution. The color's got more pop from the curves work I did on the a and be channels, but most noticeable is the recovered highlights on her cheek, lower right in the frame. I've never taken the time to figure out that dang shadows/highlights thing....glad I did.
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even scowling i can tell she's beautiful, david!
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Most of all it was an opportunity for me to try out the techniques that rutt was suggesting. I've been so busy with work (worked yesterday, working today) that I haven't had any time to shoot. I had a short breather yesterday, and got that shot of my daughter.
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At this point, I find it's mostly faster to start from scratch than to go back and try to edit the final version to change something.
Yes, well my routine has changed in the last few weeks. I used to have one. And my pictures seemed good then, too. But with the new sharpening, the shadows/highlights (uh, Rutt, why don't you use the contrast there.) It says in the books that is one of the good things about that tool, it does not destroy like the one I used to use and it only works on the middle tones, like in the RAW set up.
David, I really like that photo of your daughter. I don't think of that as scowling. I and my children can scowl much better than that. In fact, if I am not smiling, I try not to for photographs. then I just normally must have a super scowl. Don't understand it, I don't look like that in the bathroom mirror.
I love her eyes and freckles, too. Beautiful coloring.
I spent another 16.00 on photo magazines........One was the expensive one, I usualy won't spend much for a photo magazine. Alot of ones are on nature right now.
And I was thinking of color management, too, when I mentioned your daughter. I don't see that much change in the color, so she is just naturally good, but I really do want a good book on lighting sometime. (Natural, as in taking the photo and afterwards, as in PS. I hate that there are so few on taking the photographs, especially people and color, etc.) That is why I am buying mags I guess. Sorry for all the talking.......long.
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Mostly I just wanted to see how my image correction process differs from others' processes. My disadvantage is that I used the smaller picture that David posted earlier.
I modified it by first selecting the highlights by hitting <ctrl><alt> ~ and copied that selection as a new layer by hitting <ctrl> j. Then I activated the background image again and selected the highlights once again by hitting <ctrl><alt> j and then inverted that selection (thereby selecting the shadows) by hitting <ctrl> <shift> i and then copied that selection as a new layer by hitting <ctrl> j.
At this point I have the original image as the background, the shadow detail as Layer 2 right above it and the highlights as layer 1 on the top. I've found with relatively bright images, I have the best results when I change the layer opacity of the highlight and shadow layers set to overlay (for darker ones screen works well, sometimes multiply, sometimes a combo of two different ones). I reduced the opacity a lot (30% for both Layer 1 and Layer 2) since this made the contrast a bit too high. The resulting image still lacked a bit of pop so I flattened the image and changed the mode to Lab and steepend the a and b and punched up the mid-tones a bit.
On portraits you want to sharpen the detail and leave the skin softer, so in order to do that, I changed the mode back to RGB. I then created an alpha channel mask based on the luminance channel. To do that I drug the RGB composite channel down to the "Load channel as selection" button then clicked on the "save selection as a channel" button immediately to the right of that. I then hit <ctrl> d to deselect.
I made sure the new alpha channel was active and went to stylize -> find edges. I hit <ctrl> i to invert the channel and create a negative. I applied a Gausian blur of 2 to the alpha channel. I then hit <shift><ctrl> L to do an auto levels to expand the contrast of the alpha channel.
I then loaded the alpha channel as a selection and did an unsharp mask of 165%, 3.8 pixels, and 30 levels (which may be a bit too much). This sharpened only the edges - detials like eyebrows, eyes, and lips while keeping the skin and other areas unaffected.
Original:
My adjustments:
David's final image:
So what do you think?
Mike
P.S. I put this on a private gallery with no keywords and, like I said, I will delete it and this post if you want me to.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
I don't see your adjustments, though? Just my images.
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http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Another thing I thought to mention to you:
You should have seen my first RAW conversion. She's sitting under a shade tree, and it had a definite green cast to it from the leaves that I didn't notice first time through. I went back and reprocessed it, removing the green cast. Much easier for me in RAW than in RGB, LAB, etc.
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I hated my freckles too. Tell A that when she's older she won't even notice them in the mirror; can't imagine me as "me" without them now.
I use Rutt's LAB method; off to find the sharpening tutorial.
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Looks good, except for the highlights on the cheek that I was trying to recover. I also might be concerned about the magenta in her face being too much. The rest looks good. I'll take a closer look at what you did later (still working on a Sunday!)
Oh, and about the scowl---she's got a pretty bad cold in the shot, too.
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For faces of people with dark hair, you can sharpen the cyan and black channels in CMYK without doing much damage to skin. In this particular image, this focuses almost all the sharpening on the eyes, eye brows, and some hair.
My steps in order:
2. Move to CMYK and pull down the C curve thogh the midtones and steepen to the shadows. This gets the grey out of the skin and retains the deep color and shadow in the eyes:
3. USM on cyan and black channels only. Targeted so accurately, we can afford to use pretty big numbers without sharpening skin texture. Usually, I don't worry with such young people, but this is a demonstration of how far I can go.
And here is the result:
Maybe I overdid the cyan curve and she is a little too red now. You have to be the judge of that. But notice how much sharpening I was able to apply to her eyes and eyebrows without any affect to her skin.
Here's the Shadow/Highlight settings I used:
Cyan Curves:
and USM:
Here's the result:
I then used some guassian blur, history brush and reduced opacity on another layer to reduce, but not eliminate, her freckles.
What do you all think?
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Also, I don't think you need a brush and blur to tone down the freckles. Try taking to LAB and making the extreme magenta and yellow sides of the curves a little more shallow:
You can take this further, but her lips will also start to desaturate. You can use the L curve to make her face lighter.
An alternative for recovering the cheek would be to try this: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2069
I do want to recover more of the highlights, but I can't do it without drawing attention to it, IMO.
Next thing I'm gonna try is reprocessing from RAW for the highlights and blend the two exposures.
But for now...off to work!
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What exactly do you want? Less sharpening around the eyes? Less skin saturation? Lighter skin? Less contrast between the skin and freckles? I think it's possible to get all this starting from one raw conversion. At least in ACR, you can just make sure there is no clipping on either end and then do the rest in PS. Can you make a conversion like that and post a link to a full sized original along with your goals. I'll bet we can nail it.
I actually was pretty happy with the last bit I did, based on your ideas. I do think that I can recover more of the highlight detail, but I find that if I go too far with Shadow/Highlights, it looks unnatural. I thought that blending another exposure on the lightness channel might help.
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Make sure to try this trick: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2069
Sometimes it's just the thing. Also after shadow/highlight it's very common to need some curves to restore a more natural look.
But I used to dislike what the lab over here did with my photos, and we went round and round. Must be so frustrated to be an involved photographer, work in or own a lab, and have idiots like me insist that they do it "wrong" in their opinion. I got my previews done free by bill's work lab (this was film), 4 X 6s, and I would pick out a person or landscape from those, and I did not want this local lab changing my choices.
David knows what his kid looks like, or wants to look like, or he wants her to look like. I did what I thought were great photos of my granddaughter, have not been thanked or anything. Their photos are contrasty, trashy, etc. This is Courtney. I wanted her clean cut, beautiful and "soft".......example you have all seen. (I wonder why they want her trashy, Julie's boys, older teens, teased her so unmercifully she changed from her trashy tops at Thanksgiving, THANKSGIVING HALTER TOPS?) And they are very controlling parents. Probably raising a little rebel.
Hey, I will throw you all a sample of how I thought a 14 yr old should look, a converted trash one, .............well, you would have had to see the before.
I doubt anyone would want to work on the originals, but will give link to gallery, took me hours to find it. This girl wears deep blue eyeshadows and rings of mascara. Due to heavy teasing she toned it down. Some photos I spent more time on than others. I used Scott Kelby's glamour advanced Skin/women thing in the PS CS, that is quite a good thing, IMO. Don't think it is too heavy, actually depending on what you have and where you want to get it.
http://gingerSnap.smugmug.com/gallery/301768/4/12760327 (I don't know why that gallery doesn't link, will make it public, too.)
Will make originals available.
http://gingerSnap.smugmug.com/photos/12776441-L.jpg
This one is bigger, some of you would call it soft........it is the processing. This is a "child" who did beauty pageants half of her life, never won, was probably the fault of how her mother "presented" her. She is a cheerleader.
And she was/and probably is, drop dead gorgeous, almost, if she were "done" right. The rest of our family IS more clean cut. Have to work hard to make her look natural...I suppose in some minds the only worse things I could do is make her black and white.
with her father, and he was never heavy as a child, a bit stocky as a teenager, but my gosh, he grew wide.
This is courtney the first night. Sweatshirt covers trashy summer tee (Would be fine if it were summer). But her hair sticking together is intentional on her part. By the next night that was gone.
The first one I did, way too much PS, but I liked it at the time, still do really.
This below is the last one I did and my favorite. Her family prefer the bright blue mascara, very heavy eye make up with those greasy bangs........????
So I try to educate all of them, isn't going to work. Now the teen boys, her cousins, their teasing did work. Really when we all first saw her, it was a silent "what can you say" type of meeting after a long time no see.
David, I love freckles. I suppose what you could say to a kid who hates hers is that when she gets older, she can cover them with make up, but if you don't have them, you can't go out and get them.
OK, you all hate these portraits, I am too tired to show you that I don't Glam everyone.
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The idea of this trick is to find the channel that has the detail and definition you need and use it for a luminosity blend with the composite RGB image. For faces, there is often great detail in the green and blue channels, since human faces are essentially red and thus detail resides in the other two channels. A look at the blue channel reveals great chin detail, but too much freckles for your taste (I guess.) But the green channel shows promise.
So I copied and pasted the green channel as it's own layer. (Select the green channel in the channel pallette, select-all, copy, deselect, layer pallette, paste.) Set the blend mode of this new layer to luminosity:
The result was much better, but not all that I hoped for. Poking around with the color sampler in the new green layer, though, reveals that there is hope. Now there is some detail in the cheek, revealed by different settings where before there was only uniformity.
So, I resorted to the primary rule of color correction: The steeper the curve, the greater the detail. In this case we want more detail in the very highest highlights to bring back the face. On the other hand we don't want to emphasize the freckles. So I applied this curve to the new layer that was originally the green channel:
Result:
I'm guessing this is a pretty good starting place for you. I've restored the chin without much impact on her complexion or skin tone. If you do this in 16 bit mode starting with an unclipped import from raw, I think you'll have even better success. You shouldn't have to blend two different conversions, which has many other different problems (harder ones, I think.)
You can take this further, if you like. The obvious corollary of the relation of steepness and detail is The flatter the curve the less the detai. In this case, perhaps you'd like to deemphasize those freckles, but make sure you don't lose the sharpness of the eyes? Flatten the curve for the new layer through the midtones where the freckles and skin live and then steepen again in the shadows were the eyes, eyebrows, and hair reside:
Result:
This takes it way too far for my taste, but I'm just trying to show you where the controls are so you can correct to your own taste.
Returning to first version, you can now sharpen using the cyan and black channel trick. I combined this with the Sharpening Tutorial, Part 2 technique and ended up with this: