I am new to this web site. A friend of mine asked if I could improve upon this image. I have begun to play with it, but I am open for any suggestions. Thanks. Greg.

Hi Gregory, have done a quick job on your image. What I did is as follows.

1. Create levels adjustment layer, and adjust R,G and B channels seperately to rough colour correct image.

2. Place eyedropper on Highlight area and colour correct highlights using colour balance layer.

3. Do same for Midtones.

4. Do same for Shadows.

5. Create New Layer set blend mode to Soft Light, fill with 50% grey, then paint in darkness in central area with black paintbrush set to 5%.

A bit crude, but it gives you a starting point for further refinement.

Hope this helps.

Greg,

Can you post a larger image? You can post up to 100K. This one is too small to work on.

Thanks!

Karen

Hi Greg

I agree. A bigger pic is always easier to work on. Even with levels corrections, there still seems to be issues. Too much overall Cyan and skin tones seem to be way off. You'll probably have to do a fair amount of spot masking and correction.
On mine, I adjusted levels in R,G and B. I changed to LAB, did a Luminosity curves adjustment and copied channel then changed the mode to CMYK and pasted it into the black channel. You might also have success in increasing contrast and tonality thru Shadows/Highlites if you have CS. Plus I spent some time in Channel Mixer trying to achieve slightly believable skin tones. Be careful in what you consider to be highlite, midtones and shadow. I think we would agree that the mans shirt is white so you can balance that but i think the rest would be pure guesswork as to what is actual medium gray or black. Keep in mind that if you are balancing something that you think is black but is actually dark maroon, you may be introducing color casts again into the picture.

Cheers
Dave

I agree with Karen and Duv -- we really need a bigger (without getting too compressed) image to work on.

Here's my attempt at a quick colour cast removal. There's more work to be done in attempting to rescue the partially blown-out areas and on some fine colour adjustments in individual areas (e.g. skin tones), but that's the kind of work that really needs a bigger image to get good results.

Hi gregory,

Welcome to RP! :pleased:

I agree with everybody about the picture size .... Here (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4398) you can find an excellent tip about resizing images for RP.

I had a go at you picture ....


I used and tweaked the Lightness Channel of the LAB Mode to fix the 'partially blown out areas' as Leah pointed out.


Used Levels, Curves, Selective Colors to minimize the colour cast and correct the colours.


Created a Luminosity Mask (Ctrl+Alt+~), copied it on its own Layer (Ctrl+J) and changed its blending to Multiply trying to further enhance details in the very light areas.


Created a new empty Layer (blending = Overlay) and with a soft black and white brush (Opacity 10%) I painted over 'flat' areas to get the illusion of 3D.


Used the Blur Tool to smooth out the worst compression blocks/lines.


Finally I sharpened the image lightly.

Played about a bit more with your image.