skydog, tigerphoto, megl
thank you so much for your great comments!!!
... sorry to keep you waiting... was out the whole day yesterday!
megl, Quote:
|
Originally Posted by megl Flora: I can't upload images - I'm on a Mac and I tried with both Safari and FireFox. I followed the guide you wrote, but when I have selected the image on my HD and choose upload, the upload just hangs |
... I see both your picture are over 150KB in size ... the limit for attachments to posts or threads here at RetouchPRO is
100KB 
... (200KB for the Gallery).. so I guess that was the reason of your problem attaching them!!
Great work!! I love the bronze cast on your 'One step further' version
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... Ok.. here is what I did with this picture:
Brightening the image:
1) Duplicated the background
2)
Ctrl+I Inverted the duplicate (now it's nearly white!)
3) Changed the Blending of the inverted duplicate to Overlay
4) duplicated the Overlay Layer twice more.
5) created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to improve colours and saturation a bit.
6)
Merged visible (*)
Result after these procedures in
Attachment 1 (*) Merge Visible:
Keeping the Alt key pressed, open your Layers Palette's Menu and, click on 'Merge Visible'.
A new Layer containing all your corrections will be created on top of all the other Layers ....
This procedure enables you to carry on with your restoration from your advanced point... without losing any of the previous steps/Layers... thus giving you the possibility to retrace your steps and making changes wherever necessary.... even after you've 'finished' the job.... Minimizing the noise
I have the Plug-in version of Neat Image so did everything inside Photoshop, but if you work with the
free standalone program do the following:
1) Save a 'flattened' copy of your 'up to now' restored image, but keep your working Photoshop original open and ready...
2) Open the saved flattened copy in Neat Image. (in Neat Image, click on the '
Noise Filter Settings' tab, then go to
Tools and click on
Advanced Mode)
Neat Image comes with several 'Preset' Settings...
Attachment 2
For normal 'noisy' images, until you get familiar with it and create and save your own settings, the 'Default' Setting is a good start ... To change the result, (
in most cases, the Default Settings are much too strong for my taste and tend to give an unnatural 'plastic' look to the whole image, but particularly to skin) simply start playing/experimenting by moving the
Noise Levels' and '
Noise Reduction Amounts' sliders found on the rightmost part of the window.. (one at the time so you can see the difference they make individually!) ...
For this extremely noisy image, Neat Image Default Setting made very little difference, so, I simply pulled
all the '
Noise Levels' and '
Noise Reduction Amounts' sliders completely to the right, then carefully pulled back some of them to leave a bit of noise in the image.. (the skin looks fine, but the background is a bit too soft ... no problem we will correct that
Attachment 3
3) Save the noise corrected copy, open it in Photoshop,
Shift+drag it on top of your 'waiting and ready'
Photoshop working original to continue working on it, and close your noise corrected copy..
4) Create a white Layer mask for the noise corrected Layer and, with a soft black brush (Opacity 30%) paint around the model to bring back some of the 'rougher' texture of the underlying Layer ... This to correct the excessive 'softness' of the background and make the image look more natural.
My Mask for the Layer
Attachment 4
Well, after this it's up to you to decide how much or how little you want to do to finish your restoration ...
My new final result
Attachment 5
Hope this helps...
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