Flesh tone experts - help!

[Rexx]

Here I am, on a relatively quiet Sunday morning, trying to understand.

Several of you just - which were Stroker's words? - tweaked and messed with Curves and Hue/Sat, and by magic, a decent image appears. Too difficult for me. I get the impression I really have a colour sight problem. After an hour or less, it is all one big mess and I get the feeling I cannot distinguish red from blue anymore.

[A side note: My keyboard (electronic musical instrument) has the possibility for tuning. I can easily hear the difference between 440.3Hz and 440.0Hz. Now that's a difference quite a bit less than 1/1000. Not so with my eyes ]

So as opposed to the tweakers and messers, whose level I will never reach I try to understand the ones of you who have done really strange things.

Janet
"The blue channel was the one with the problem"

What problem? How to adjust? (Duv says he raised Blue)

Stroker
"Extract Hue to colour..." "Extract saturation to Red..." "Extract luminosity..."

Real dumb question here: What do you mean by that?

Hephaestos
Did you do a manual Auto Levels really? Like byRo in the next post?

byRo
I duplicated your method and got the same result, so I passed test #1

How did you notice that the colour problem was different between highlight and shadow? This is something that would be very useful to learn.

I liked the trick of "reusing" the Channel mixer with Luminosity blend. Cool. And thanks for reminding about the reduced Opacity setting. I use it a lot, but tend to forget (for some unfathomable reason!) that I can use it all the time for any layer.

Hephaestos (again)
I think calibration is very easy??? Just check "Advanced", which isn't advanced at all.

philbach
In desperation this morning I tried CMYK too. Dead end for me. But I "stole" your eyes desat trick

venivedi (almost vici )
Just a comment: "daily work"? Home at 01:22? I don't call that "daily"

Comparing the various attempts here; I see that the ones I like best, all have in common that some attempt has been made to take care of the blown Red channel, either as a direct frontal attack, or more indirectly. That includes venividi, byRo, nkollias and myself. In all the other images, there is a washed-out quality (quality???) to the image, although the colours may be superior to mine. I think from this I can deduce that no channel should be allowed to be blown, ever. At least in facial shots.

Also there is the trick to copy the L channel from Lab. I have done that in the past, but forgotten about it One should probably retouche a bit every day, if it hadn't been for my daytime job. Time to retire...

7500K is too high I think. Depending on whom you ask, daylight is somewhere between 5600K and 6500K. I don't know why the other choices are available at all.

Rest of the gang
You didn't do anything I didn't already know, except you did it better than I
Unfortunately, that doesn't help me much! Practice practice practice

BTW, are you all aware that you can use the arrow keys in Curves to adjust the point? Sure beats the mouse.

[denschneider]

Made a hue/saturation adj layer .set master saturation at-23and hueat-2,red saturation at-5, and yellow at-5. then I made a levels adj layer and because I couldn’t see anything in the picture that I thought should be white I used the black eye dropper on her pupils to set the black point. Then on the red channel I mover the black input levels slider to 21. Then duplicated the background layer twice and on the first copy adjusted the saturation to extreme red applied a layer makes and painted back in the lips with a 60% brush and then adjusted the layer opacity until I got the “right” look. Same process for the second layer only used green for the eyes

[Stroker]

Stroker
"Extract Hue to colour..." "Extract saturation to Red..." "Extract luminosity..."

Real dumb question here: What do you mean by that?

See attachment

Upper-Left
Original photo of Biker Chic.

Upper-Right
The hues have been "extracted" to colour.

Lower-Left
Saturation has been "extracted". One side is greyscale and the other is just in the R channel. Pros and cons to both ways.
This is Photoshop's flavor of Saturation.

Lower-Right
Luminosity "extracted".
This is Photoshop's flavor of Luminosity.

*See link to other thread for my PC/Win plugs for help with this. If not PC/Win, I can show stock tool ways of doing all of that.

Tear apart, fix the individual pieces, then put back together.
Since Sat and Lum are Photoshop's flavors, can be put back together right in the Layers palette with Blending modes and can be tweaked with your favorite adjustment layers.

This past week or so, I've been doing some very interesting stuff.
I understand colour cast much better and have come up with some very promising plans of attack.
I get all goose pimply thinking about it.
Rawr!

[venivedi]

Hello, Rexx. I'm back home 10 minutes early than usual.

denschneider, I like your work because she looks warm and friendly.

Interesting stuff you've attached, Stroker. Thanks for sharing.

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by Stroker

Upper-Right
The hues have been "extracted" to colour.

I don't understand how you do that. Is it with a plugin?

Originally Posted by Stroker

Lower-Left
Saturation has been "extracted".

Ditto

Originally Posted by Stroker

Lower-Right
Luminosity "extracted".
This is Photoshop's flavor of Luminosity.

Fortunately, this is recognizable

Originally Posted by Stroker

If not PC/Win, I can show stock tool ways of doing all of that.

Mac...

Originally Posted by Stroker

Tear apart, fix the individual pieces, then put back together.
Since Sat and Lum are Photoshop's flavors, can be put back together right in the Layers palette with Blending modes and can be tweaked with your favorite adjustment layers.

I'm with you!

Originally Posted by Stroker

I get all goose pimply thinking about it.
Rawr!

Have you intened to keep the goose pimples to yourself?

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by venivedi

Hello, Rexx. I'm back home 10 minutes early than usual.

I just reset my date/time control panel to your time zone. You're 8 hours ahead of me.

Originally Posted by venivedi

Interesting stuff you've attached, Stroker. Thanks for sharing.

Please don't say you understood it?

[venivedi]

In fact, half and half.

[Stroker]

Quick-n-Sleazy Mini-Ramble

Start with a photo.

Extract Hue to Colour

Copy photo.

Edit > Fill
- Use: 50% Grey
- Mode: Luminosity

Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation
- Sat = +100

What you will be left with is pure hues.
Quick-n-sleazy, not perfect, but functional.

Extract Saturation

Copy photo.

See: Saturation Out and In

Lately I've been using a variation of that.
After extracting Sat to greyscale and it's on it's own layer, I'll fill Blue and Green with pure black. This will leave Sat in just the Red channel. Tweaks are then done directly to the R channel. For example, if you want to tweak Sat with Curves, use the drop-down in Curves to select the Red channel. This eleminates the need for a Gradient Map.

*Beer in mind that this is Photoshop's flavor of Saturation. This is *not* the same as S in HSB or S in HSL.

Extract Luminosity

Copy photo.

Edit > Fill
- Use: White, Black, or 50% Grey
- Mode: Saturation

You will be left with Photoshop's flavor of Luminosity.

Putting it together, my Layer palette looks something like this:

Extracted Luminosity set to Luminosity blending mode
Extracted Saturation set to Saturation blending mode
Extracted Hue set to Normal blending mode or Hue
Original Photo

With basic tweaks:

-- adjustment layer clipped to Lum
Lum
-- adjustment layer clipped to Sat
Sat
-- adjustment layer clipped to Hue
Hue
Original photo

When I'm looking to fix a photo, I always go through most of that. Sometimes all I need is a little hue shift and a little bit of sat tweakage. Sometimes it's just lum and sat. Other times, by looking at these 'channels', I'll get a better plan of attack using other tools.

As you can see, extracting HS/Lum is relatively simple. Shouldn't take much to record an Action. Personally, I wrote my own PC/Win plugs to do it for me with some extra options.

That is the very basic technique. If you get to playing with it and expounding on the ideas, you just might be surprised. The acrobatics that can be done with this never cease to amaze me.

That is where my flow starts. If you take a piece of it, cool. If not, that's cool, too.

I am working on a rather large series of tutorials that will get into the serious nitty-gritty of it.

I'm not sure what to say about my goose pimply idea. Kind of hard to explain.
You will be able to modify any two 'channels' with any two values much in the same way that Displace works.

Imagine something like this:
if (hue = red & sat = medium)
the (hue = magenta & sat = low)

It gets *much* better than that, but that's where I'm going to leave it for now.

[Duv]

Originally Posted by Rexx

Several of you just - which were Stroker's words? - tweaked and messed with Curves and Hue/Sat, and by magic, a decent image appears. Too difficult for me. I get the impression I really have a colour sight problem. After an hour or less, it is all one big mess and I get the feeling I cannot distinguish red from blue anymore.

Vegard, you don't have a color sight problem..period!! Get it out of you head. Your overlay on mine was an excellent skin tone rendition. Note I said rendition. There are many "acceptable" tonal variations. Much of it comes down to preference. I prefer mine to have only slightly higher yellow values..you like a higher yellow value. Nobody has a problem with that. All you want to do is keep yellow about 20 to 33 percent higher than magenta. When you look at your original picture it obviously had too much yellow. Reading off her forhead, yellow is double that of magenta. So, you can either work in CMYK and change the yellow curve to reduce or work in RGB and raise the Blue curve (increasing blue reduces yellow). Or use Hue/Saturation, Color balance, photo filter overlays.. whatever wags your tail to get your percentages! That's why in an earlier post someone said there was a problem with the blue channel..it was too weak which means too much yellow, right?
In any case, that is why I almost always work by the numbers because often I don't trust my eyes either.
So, when you have an image with "known" black, white and even better greys points, you balance the numbers to eliminate the cast. I'm sure you understand that. With your picture that's harder to do but for skin tones there's plenty written about skin tone values. Work to the values, 20 to 33% more yellow than magenta. Adding more Cyan gives more of a tanned look. Tweaking is by definition, minor adjustments that are made to suit your own personal taste. Also, don't forget that Sharpening your image and increasing/decreasing the RGB curve can give your image a very different and powerful look. Sorry, I'm starting to rant!

Cheers
Dave

[Rexx]

Finally understood what you're up to. (If you look at my tutorials, they're weird too) And I won't have time to look at it again until Thursday! I wonder what activity will be down-prioritized... work?

I guess you're one hour behind me, and it's bedtime here already

Best part here:

Originally Posted by Stroker

*Beer in mind that ....

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

What an interesting Thread and even more interesting methods!!!! Thanks for sharing!!!

Rexx,

Originally Posted by Rexx

tweaked and messed with Curves and Hue/Sat, and by magic, a decent image appears. Too difficult for me. I get the impression I really have a colour sight problem. After an hour or less, it is all one big mess and I get the feeling I cannot distinguish red from blue anymore.

Well, Rexx, than I must have a colour sight problem as well because after 'tweaking and messing' with colours for a period of time I get those symptoms too!!!!!

I had posted my version of your Image, but after reading and trying Kisa's tip I removed it and here is what I came up with.

I don't know how this will look like on the differently calibrated monitors .... but on mine it looks quite nice and, what more, I got there with a few very simple steps:

1) Kiska's excellent tip about Image>Adjustment>Match Color.... thanks again for it!!!! (values in Attachment 2)
...This gave me the basis for the next steps. (Attachment 3)
2) Selective Color Adjustment Layer. (Values in Attachment 4)
3) Brightness & Contrast Ajustment Layer (Brightness = +43; Contrast = +21), Ctrl+I inverted it's Layer Mask and with a soft white Brush (Opacity 50-80%) painted over Lene's eyes to brighten them up a bit.
4) Merged Visible (the action for merging 'visible' without losing the underlying 'steps' can be downloaded here.)
5) USM to ligthly sharpen the image and improve contrast.

My Layers Palette in Attachment 5.
Just change the values in each Adjustment Layer until you are satisfied with the result....

[venivedi]

Flora, wow(jaw drop) it looks very vivid. I like it very much.
Stroker, you made me happy to study sort of math(including D-Map in PS) .
I've followed your tutorial and found it very interesting! Thanks a lot.

[Flora]

venivedi,

Thank you so much for your kind feedback!!!!

[byRo]

Originally Posted by Rexx

byRo
How did you notice that the colour problem was different between highlight and shadow? This is something that would be very useful to learn.

When I do my little colour-declipping routine, I'll usually be looking at an even rust-coloured area for skin with maybe some greys in the highlights and deep shadows (second image). In this case the colour was anything but even (first image). It was pretty obvious that the highlights were one colour and the shadows another. Actually, it's a bit like Stroker's "separation" process (yes I do understand), but instead of taking Hue and Saturation separately, I prefer them combined as Colour.
I will almost always correct an image separately Luminosity / Colour.

(This thread is getting really interesting)
Rô

[Rexx]

Originally Posted by byRo

When I do my little colour-declipping routine, I'll usually be looking at an even rust-coloured area for skin with maybe some greys in the highlights and deep shadows (second image). In this case the colour was anything but even (first image). It was pretty obvious that the highlights were one colour and the shadows another.

In this case, red was blown over half the face, and if I had had my head attached to my shoulders instead of under the arm, I would have understood that this severely skews the colour balance between highlight and shadows, argh!
Also in this case I would not have needed fancy colour separation, but I am pretty sure that I would have found the same effect on correctly exposed shots (will check - have several), given what I know about the light in that room. I think I finally may be on the road to a technique I can correct my favourite portrait, one that has been lying around for 1.5 years...

Originally Posted by byRo

(This thread is getting really interesting)

You can say that again! And there may even be a possibility that when we round off, around 280 posts or so, I may finally have learnt how to correct flesh tones

(And if anyone wonders, yes I have the time to post, but not play with Photoshop!)