First Retouching photo

[AdamZx3]

Hello, this is my first finished photo retouching job, I am reading the restoration and retouching book and am about 1/4 way through and am learing allot. I restored this for my grandpa, but I think I am going to give it another go after I get a new scanner. I focused mostly on color collection and little with cloning scratches etc. I did allot of work with levels, curves, channel blender, saturation, using masks to seperate objects.

Here she is rip it apart, I would like to know what to look out for next time around!

Problems I noticed so far,

1.Ground is muddy and no detail (when I lighten with curves,levels or blending modes at best it turns the black into blowout brown splotches...I think its too low key to hold enough information

2. Skin tones need to be more consistant

3.after printing for some reason from the horses legs down is a lighter, this is where I made a soft gradiant mask. Before print...great....after print...horible..could be my moniter? (calibrated with adobe gamma)

other than that what can I improve in it?


didn't mean to write a book!

[chiroka]

i see a contrast between bright sky and dark bottom part of photo.

[Kraellin]

welcome to RP.

nicely done!

like chiroka said, you've got a lot of dark on the bottom. i'd be very tempted to mask or select the bottom dark area and lighten it a bit. and yes, the problem is probably lost detail in the dark. but, there are ways to fake it or cheat. i like to select the dark area as a selection, promote it to a new layer and work on it separately. i can then do things like adding an overlay layer or a blank raster layer with a fill to lighten it up. this will keep it from going brown. use blend modes as desired.

on the skin tones, i wouldnt worry too much here. the skin area is so small as to be relatively unimportant. if you're even close, it's going to be ok through the printer. that's not to say get sloppy with it, but it's just not the major portion of this image.

on the printing problem, this sounds a lot like an 'out of gamut' thing. all that means is that the printer cant print as many colors as you can see on the monitor, so it tries to fake it and misses often enough. if you're using photoshop there is a way to check for this. but, since i dont use photoshop, you'll have to catch one of the folks that do to find where this is. once you find that out you can select the colors that the printer can use correctly and you shld be fine.

for a first job, i'd say you're well on your way to the pros. nicely done!

craig

[AdamZx3]

thanks, I want to try another one with a better original soon, i have a habbit of biting of more than I can chew.

I do want to try and remove the horizontal gradiants and reprint to see if it removes the banding, i even previewed in CMYK and it is a little more noticalble but not by much though I do want to fix the ground by faking it....might hold off untill i finish my book for that though.

any other crits?