Hi all,

My nephew recently got engaged and the only visual record is pictures taken by his future mother-in law on a CD. My sister wants hard copies of some of the images. She wants new backgrounds on some, images combined on others and... Lets just say she has some strange ideas.

My problem is that all the images suffer from a combination of everything that is not good. The reception room is saturated in yellows, greens and gold and bad lighting. Clothing, walls, lighting and decorations were all gold or yellow which is affecting everything. And to make matters worse the photographer had way too much to drink :)

No matter what I do I can't find a happy medium when I try to correct some of the color and exposure problems.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I have attached one of the better shots taken just so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Paris

The first thing I did was fiddle with Luminosity.
- copy photo
- set to Luminosity
- clip a Curves Adjustment Layer
- Mess with Curves for some brightening and a touch of contrast in the fleshtones

Messing with the Lum like that seemed to take care of most of the photo. The rest was just a few little things.

I don't know if it's good form or not, but lowered the saturation on the bricks. Used Hue/Sat Ad-Layer and painted a quick mask. Not sure if this is a good idea or not.

Then upped the saturation of the lovely couple just a tad. Again, Hue/Sat with some mask painting.

Then selected some yellows and shifted them a tad towards red. Pretty much only in the faces. The dudes shirt did get shifted a bit, but seems fine to me.

The female seems to have decent amount of magenta, but I left it alone.

BTW, when I tweak Lum in photos like this, I *always* have the Lum tweaks at the top of the Layer palette. This is a way that makes sense to me and it's always good to be consistant with some things.

I have to agree with Paris. That's pretty nasty. Too bad you can't write an action to correct all your pictures.

I initially worked by the numbers, balanced the white card to 230 and the nite sky to 24 (probably should be adjusted slightly for the blue). Selected the couple and fiddled with skin tones in CMYK. Sampled her bra line skin and in Color mode painted out that incredible pink skin. Did the same thing to remove the yellow cast remaining on the gents right forehead and cheek. Didn't think the bricks should be too white so sampled lighter area by her shoulder and painted over the wall in Color mode again.

Cheers
Dave

Hi Stroker & Dave,

Thanks for the help and ideas.

Stroker - could you please expand your explanation of what you did with luminosity. I'm afraid I don't understand the whole concept of it very well.

Where I'm at:

1 Used curves for initial adjustments and to sort out some color balance.

2 Masked and used a Hue/Sat Ad-Layer on the bricks. I was surprised that
just desaturating them slightly made a great deal of difference to the
image.

3 Adjusted the skin tones in CYMK with a mask, which I them inversed and
further adjusted the walls, clothing etc. It was a hit and miss affair as I'm
still coming to grips with how the colors interact.

4 In color mode sampled and painted the couples skin with low opacity
brushes bit by bit till I was fairly happy with the result.

5 Masked the couple and ran a Levels adjustment to pop them out from the
background ever so slightly.

And this is it so far :)

Advice or criticism welcome.

Paris

Almost forgot,

Dave, I agree, it would be fine if an action could be made to cover some of the work, but in this case I don't think it's possible.

I've attached part of two shots that were taken just seconds apart of the same person so you can get an idea of the wonderful diversity :wink: the photographer offers.

Paris

2 Masked and used a Hue/Sat Ad-Layer on the bricks. I was surprised that just desaturating them slightly made a great deal of difference to the
image.
That's something that I've been playing with lately. Sometimes too much of one colour can give the illusion of colour cast when there actually is none. Like 'perceptual bleeding' or something.

When I look at a few flowers against a lot of foliage, I don't see any colour cast. However, people wearing beige against yellow bricks and I do perceive colour cast when there actually is none. Interesting phenom.

Stroker - could you please expand your explanation of what you did with luminosity. I'm afraid I don't understand the whole concept of it very well.

You might be surprised at how many photos can be greatly improved with Luminosity. I could babble a few pages about this, but I'll keep it short.

Try this:
- copy photo
- Edit > Fill
--- Use: Black, White, or 50% Grey
--- Mode: Saturation

What you will be left with is Photoshop's flavor of Lum in greyscale. If you change this layer to Luminosity, you shouldn't see any difference from the original photo.

To this Luminosity layer, clip or group a Curves Adjustment Layer. Mess with the curve in the Curves dialog. As you mess around with Curves, you should see some dramatic changes. This is a very excellant way of boosting contrast, brightening/darkening, or washing out a photo.

Now, when I was messing around with the first photo you posted, I didn't convert the photo to greyscale luminosity. Instead, I just copied and set blending mode to Lum. This was so I could take advantage of how PS calculates Lum using RGB values.
Lum = Red * 0.30 + G * 0.59 + B * 0.11
In this way, I could use the drop-down in Curves to manually boost contrast of the fleshtones ever so slightly. Then I went back to RGB in Curves and did the over-all brightening.

I usually stick to Lum in greyscale, but sometimes I'll use RGB > Lum 'as is' for a little extra control.

edit:
If you can correct a few photos, you might be able to use them with Match Colour to fix the majority of the others. Worth a shot.

Hi Stroker,

OK, now I see what you were getting at with Luminosity. Thanks for explaining it further.

I have been looking through the images with a similar idea to your suggestion of Match Color. Finding 3 or 4 the suffering the same fate I would adjust one and then copy the adjustments to others. Sometimes it worked sometimes not. At least it gave me a starting point to work from.

Match Color I hadn't even considered - something else to try.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Paris

Auto levels, then the new exposure adjustment set to 1.2.

The only advantage I could suggest for this techique is it can be automated.

Using my Paint With Light actions (www.atncentral.com)...Selective Color adjustment layer...denoise and sharpen...Healing tool.

Hi cspringer

Thanks. That's a neat action and link. I hadn't been there before. Another site to loose sleep on :grin:

Paris