Please be gentle but honest with me: this is a wedding pic taken of my wife many moons ago (21 years) and it's always annoyed me with the red cast on it, so I've finally got round to trying to fix it. Now I'm a begginer with Photoshop CS so it's taken me a while (looking thru' loads of tutorials, and trying to follow them) I'm not sure if I am going about it the "right" way. Any advise will be appreciated.....John

Hi John,

welcome to RP! :pleased:

I think you did a wonderful job on your wife's picture!!!! :bigthmb:

If you'd manage to tone down the whites a bit it would be just perfect!!!

Great job!!!

Well I don't know how you got to the end, but it looks fine to me. The red cast is gone and her face is not as dark as in the original. So I think you did a good job. Way to go

As for toneing down the whites, I have (you shold have seen them before..lol) I found that if I toned them down any more, the background left turned "muddy", it could be the way I'm doing it, but I've tried masking off the area and it begins to look false, any advise?

You don't know how I got there....neither do I!! lol, and if I did it again, it would, no doubt, look different. But I have to admit, I do like it a lot more then the original, and it has taught me a lot about PSCS. I used to like to use Corel Photopaint, but I don't think I could have got it as good as it is now, and I'm dead chuffed....thankyou

Hi again,

I looked at the original again and saw exactly what you mean ... "you shold have seen them before.." :o:

As you surely know by now, there are about a billion ways to do the same thing with PS!!! :D ;) ... but for selecting luminosity, I go back to the selection method described in this Tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=120) very often ...

Thanks for the link Flora, I'll take a look......did I not see a tip on this forum somewhere about "ctrl+alt+1" selecting highlights?
John.

Yep!! you certainly did!! :happy: ... Ctrl+Alt+~ = the overall luminosity

Ctrl+Alt+1 = Red Channel Luminosity
Ctrl+Alt+2 = Green Channel Luminosity
Ctrl+Alt+3 = Blue Channel Luminosity

woodbine,

i think you did a nice job also. but i'll offer one addtional correction you can make here that shld help a bit more. your 'after' is a bit on the high contrast and still blown out a bit. this is making the colors a bit stark and the whites a bit more dominating than they shld be.

the correction is a simple 'histogram adjustment'. normally, i might suggest curves or levels, but in this case you have a fair significant 'shift' of luminosity over to the high side. and the best tool for correcting shifts like this is the histogram adjustment filter (haf).

this filter allows you to shift the luminosity. it also allows for clipping the highs and lows and changing the overall luminosity. in your image you have a predominance of highs so you'd want to simply shift these more towards the mids and maybe clip the top range down a bit. after that you'd simply adjust the overall to suit.

and that's it. that's the only tool you need to bring this image into a less sharply contrasted image.

craig

edit: notice too that by shifting the highs to the mids you are effectively adding luminosity to her somewhat shaded face, evening it out nicely.

You mean something like this? I moved black point to 20, mid to 1.2 and left white at 255 (after some deliberation). I'm not sure wheather I like this, it maybe brightens up the tree in the background a little too much I think, however I can see your point. Thanks for the input......John

woodbine,

well, put the two attachments one over the other here on the web site and just flip back and forth and you'll easily see the differences. there's nothing wrong with contrast, but i just think yours is a bit much and the highs are still too high overall. so, even if you left the contrasts alone as a treatment and did nothing but reduce the highs, i think it would be better. notice the face, for instance. that's where it really shows.

as for the background, you can treat that independent of the main subject and darken or lighten without affecting the main subject.

craig

OH GOD!!! I can't seem to get this , when you said histogram adjustment "filter" (haf) did you mean a "filter" or levels adjustment? (sorry for being stupid, I'm quite new at PS) and yes I can see the difference between yours and mine even at low res, so it would look better at high.....John

ah, you changed your name.

the histogram adjustment is found in paint shop pro 10 in 'adjust\brightness and contrast\' menu along with histogram equalize and histogram stretch. they are filters, not adjustment layers. not sure where they are in ps but i'm sure they have them.

craig

That's why I couldn't find them, didn't notice you use paint shop pro, found midtone contrast and colour correction, but black and white clip are greyed out, will have another better look tomorrow, it's getting late here and I'm up at 5am.....
Thanks John

Oh and the name change is Dougs doing, because everyone who's on AOL was having a problem registering on the forum. If your interested look here http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?p=120845

Thanks for all your help and advise. However I printed my original photo quite small, as a trial, this afternoon, and even at that it did look too "pastey" (not enough colour and too bright) in the face, and as you said too much contrast, It could be that my Canon printer "sees it differently" I'm now going to add some more red in the face area and try that......John

Britsdad, I think you may be looking for: Image => Adjustments => Shadow/Highlight in PS

canon huh...hmmm, not familiar with their results. never used their printers. love their cameras. most folks around here seem to use hewlett packards or epsons, with epsons getting a slightly better review. printers 'think' differently than monitors. monitors are all rgb while printers are all cmyk. the printer drivers translate the rgb into cmyk. ok, that's a generality and it's actually starting to change a bit, but there's a lot of cmyk printers out there so we'll go with that for now.

again, in general, if you've got a 3 color or even a 4 color printer, you have to watch out for 'gamut'. gamut is the range of colors, shades and so on that a device can handle and display. typically, a printer's gamut is much smaller than a monitor's. so, you work through a monitor and print through a printer and you tend to lose a bit of color and even detail at time because the printer cant handle all the shades and hues that the monitor can.

you've also got 'profiles'. this is how a color or shade is set as far as a standard is concerned. and, these vary. the most commonly used seems to be sRGB. if your editor isnt set up to display in sRGB but your printer is, you may also get variances. adobe has their own proprietary profile, 'adobe RGB' and it's not the same as sRGB. so, if you're working in adobe rgb you might want to switch to srgb.

calibration is another possibility. if you've ever walked into one of those stores that have 30 television sets going, all set to the same channel, you know what calibration is and does. those 30 tvs may all look a bit different. monitors are the same way. if your monitor is set too brightly your prints will come out dark. remember, you are working in your editor with a fixed digital system. red is a certain value of r, g and b. but, your monitor is analog. thus, you may have the right numbers in your image digitally, but be way off on the monitor. so, we calibrate to correct for color and shade. you have to do both.

now, i forget exactly where this thread is, but i do know there's one on retouchpro here that deals with calibration and can link you to several sites to do this with fair results. there are also devices you can buy that will do this. not sure of the costs or hassles though on those.

someday, i would love to get 20 of the folks here on retouch together with their computers and monitors all set up in one room and look at each to see how well they matched up.

craig

Yea, I have been all thru' calibrating monitors and colour profiles (even though some, if not most of it, goes over my head) but I still get irregularities. And I know a little about gamut. I think the problem with my results stems from actually manipulating the image on my laptop, then transfering it to pc to print it. The pc colour ect. is set up with Corel Photo Paint, not Adobe, which won't help either. As for Canon printers I can recommend them, I've had HP and Epson but I think the Canon I have (ip 3000) beats them both on quality.
John

john,

glad to hear about the canon printers. only thing i'd say on that then is to check the canon website for updates to their drivers or software and/or bug fixes. sometimes that can fix things like this.

but, in looking at your latest post, i see you're going from laptop to pc to printer. that seems a bit odd to me. if you could avoid that extra step that might also help. why not just hook the printer into the laptop?

i dont know anything about corel photo paint. and you dont mention what you are using on the desktop to print from. that could be the problem too. if corel is using something other than srgb and the desktop is using srgb then there could be a translation problem there. does corel paint allow for profiles and such or are you stuck using their profile, whatever it is? and on the desktop what are you using to print with?

i can only offer one trick at this point, not knowing the answers to the other questions; try lowering your gamma about 10 to 20% on the laptop before exporting to the pc. work with your image at those settings and then export. run a test print and alter the laptop again till you've got a matchup between the printer and laptop.

i run into this a bit with just my desktop. the prints tend to be about 5% darker. in most cases this isnt enough to worry about and when it is i simply lower the monitor settings with the buttons on the monitor and re-adjust the image accordingly.

craig

Corel has , basically the same options as PS, but I'm useing PS to print from on the PC. But I think I've got it with the photo, I have installed the printer on the laptop now (I was just too lazy to do it) and all seems to be printing fine with just a slight adjustment of lightness values...it does look really well now.
All my thanks John

excellent! well done :)

corel and adobe seem to not like each other very much. i've seen issues on transfers before. not sure what's going on there.

craig

Hi,

..just barging in ... :wink:

John,

First I'd like to apologize for the confusion I created with the Ctrl+... Command ...
Sorry to highjack this thread a little, but why is it I can't Ctrl + Alt + ~ to select the luminosity? ... to which you got the following answers:
woodbine the shortcut is shift+alt+ctrl+~Try Ctrl + Alt + Shift + ~ (depends on how your preferences are set up). ... PS default setting for this kind of selection includes the 'Shift' key ... but, as Gary rightly pointed out, you can change that in your 'Preferences' dialog box .... and 'changing' that by eliminating the need to press the 'Shift' Key, is what I've been doing since I started using PS ... (PS6!) ... so, I simply forgot to mention it... sorry .. :o: ...
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I'm very glad you are happy with your picture and that it printed well, but there is one thing I'd like to point out when 'toning down' the whites (point I made in my first post here...)... or the blacks ....

If the whites in your picture are 'pure' white (255) and the blacks are solid black (0) ... or both values you are working with are very close to these, you don't have any image information left in those areas ... meaning ... if you tone down those 'blacks' by tweaking the Levels Output value, (or using any other adjustment to that purpose... Exposure' Adjustment which lets you correct a wrong exposure in one go!]...) you'll end up with solid 'dark grey' blocks ... Same thing with the whites which tend to become a 'muddy' looking grey ....

In these cases, this procedure will surely give you a technically better balanced image ... but not necessarily a better looking one ....

Adding a hint of colour to the 'toned down' areas might give you a much more natural result even in these extreme cases .... This Tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=144) will show you how ...

Hope this helps ....

In my attachment, some of the 'pure white' areas in your picture ...

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