Post your before and after pictures here.
31 posts Page 3 of 4
Suzi, i wanted to try to. I make a dup layer desturated to -61 and painted in the black so the the background behind him would show thru.

Image


hope you didnt mind i needed to see what i could do.
judy, I don't mind at all. I can use all the input, the more the better.
John, what is the sift brush????
Suzi,

Alas, as I have confessed to before, me spell good, type bad. :crying:

In this case, the i in sift should be an o as in soft!

Doubly regrettable, sift is as good a word to the spell checker as soft!

Dang!
John
I gave this a try. Got rid of the worst of the red spots by using clone stamp with a soft brush on lighten, 22% opacity. Worked with levels and used the burn tool around the edges.
Image
Gene... this week in my class we are learning about recognizing color cast and correcting. I have to admit. I am not doing so hot on the correcting part. I kept looking at everyone's image and thinking. ok, I see a blue cast on his beard. Your image is wonderful!!
just wanted to let you know that I thought you did a great job. Now can you explain the part about working on the tone in curves?
~kimi~
Gone Crazy... Back Soon...


Gallery ~ a la kimi

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Kimi:

I came real close to deleting that post. After I did it I got to thinking this thread was dealing with making corrections in PSE, not LR and that maybe I should have kept it to myself. But it was the first time I'd tried the skin softener brush in LR2 and I was really pleased with the results. Heck....it even makes me look better! :rotfl:

Anyway, here are the settings I used in the Tone Curve section in LR2's Develop Module for that picture:
ToneCurve.jpg
ToneCurve.jpg (41.92 KiB) Viewed 736 times


If you've ever played with those settings in LR2 you've probably noticed that it can make a dramatic difference in the coloring (tone) of a picture. The more you "push" the settings in either direction, the bigger the change you can effect. Some of the presets we use in LR2 include some pretty heavy adjustments in this module.

Adjustments made here are also totally subjective. It depends on the effect within the photo you are trying to achieve. By pushing the sliders to the right, you are essentially brightening the particular adjustment, although this isn't the same type of brightening that the brightness slider adjustment makes. Pushing the sliders to the left tends to darken the attribute you are adjusting. The point curve sets the starting point. Linear is just as the picture comes from the camera, or you can set it for Medium Contrast or Strong Contrast. Again, these settings depend on what you are trying to achieve with the picture.

The only real recommendation I can make here is to play with it and see what each slider does to the picture you are working on. This will give you a general feel for this module as you learn how each one can impact your photo.

The recommendation for working on photos in general is to start at the top of the Develop Module and get the WB, Exposure section, Brightness, and Presence set, working your way down the tool set. That is the workflow that I use and don't mess with the Tone Curve settings until I have done that part. And I find myself needing to be a bit more careful making the Tone Curve adjustments as I have started falling into the habit a bit of over correcting and having to back off my settings.

And this is one of the few pictures I set the Point Curve to Linear on. :o
GeneVH

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Newtome, it looks great. Good job. Gene, thanks for explaining what you did in LR. I am going to try your workflow and see what it does. I have never messed with that adjustment much but after seeing yours I will now.
Gene, thanks so much for the explanation. I have LR2 on my new computer but I can't get the monitor calibrated so I have been spending my time working on my old laptop. I have been missing LR. I will try and deal with the monitor this week. I am truly impressed with the fact that you managed all of that in LR. :biggrin:

I have a friend that has promised to come over and help me out.
~kimi~
Gone Crazy... Back Soon...


Gallery ~ a la kimi

My Blog

kimboustany.com
Kimi, I can understand your problem, correcting color without a reasonably accurate display is a pain... Your remark about learning two stages, identifying then correcting, is interesting. I think there are really three stages.

1- Identifying, which means analysing visually AND using all necessary measuring tools
2- Deciding what changes, what results you want to apply, according to your taste and imagination. That is a previsualisation of the results, a situation when painters might be of greater help to you than a photographer.
3- Correcting via the processing tools

The second step is generally ignored, based on the asumption that there the scene you photographed was 'correct' and that there are magic tools to obtain the correct (corrected) unique result.

For instance, your very interesting portrait might need the following steps (I assume I am working with my DW's laptop, the display of which I cannot trust).
First step: printing a reduced version of the unprocessed file to get a starting comparison with your display. Evaluating the image. It's a portrait with the face in the shadows, and a part of warm light on the top left of its head, nearly burnt. The contrast is very low (no 'modelling' light) except for details. Even with a B&W version of this shot, you can be sure shadows will have a bluish cast and suspect a warm tint on the top of the head. With older persons (like me...) Skin tones have very often yellowish light parts, rosy or reddish ones and red/brown vessels marks, not to mention the local wrinkles or defects. You can check this with tools like the info palette and the histograms. Here, just add a 50% gray layer in luminosity mode: This will show you the colors without the luminosity. Most of the time, that gives you a very precise idea of the parts which have different white balance or color casts. Another adjustment layer to increase saturation may help you further. Or you can make a rough selection of the skin, paste it on a new layer, run filter/noise/average and have a look at the values in the info palette to judge how much blue is added by the shadow cast. You can also try to evaluate if the beard may be a good way to find theoretically neutral gray. Using tools like 'correct color cast' will give you a very warm rendering.
Second step:
After that, you have to ask yourself if you want to get rid totally of the blueish cast or go the way of the impressionists, ie play with it; if you want to correct the warm cast on the top of the head; if you want to unify the yellowish and reddish tints of the skin (clearly visible in the color layer described above), if you want to mask the reddish veins, increase or decrease the harsh detail contrast in the blue channel, if you want to add some depth to the flat lighting by using curves, blend modes or dodge and burn. It is time to decide if you will need need different masks for different parts of the image, which is nearly always the case. With difficult subjects like this, I would play first in ACR with the basic adjustments to see how to adjust best for different parts of the image. Sometimes it will be necessary to convert to two versions for different parts of the image, to be combined later in PSE or CS.
The third step, correcting, now has much more meaning.
Michel B
PSE6, 11,12,13.1 - LR 5.7 Windows 7 64 - OneOne Photo Perfect Suite - Canon 20D, Pana TZ6 - Fuji X100S
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