Where do I start?

[AtlanaAnna]

Craig,

Sorry. I've had a lot of things to pull me away from my computer today and I'm just now sitting down to get back to Photoshop work. Your work is incredible but it looks really florescent or maybe it's my monitor. You definitely got the yellow out and achieved a very smooth face. I've just finished trying to take some of everyone's advise and attempt to do this. Photoshop is amazing. 100 people or even more could work on the same picture, even follow the same steps and still come up with a different output! Here's my results:..................................

As you can see, I didn't achieve a great while blouse. I would also like for the lips to be more red. I didn't make a great selection of the hair so there's a hard line on one side of the hair.

Please share any suggestions.

Thanks!
Sylvia

[CJ Swartz]

Sylvia,

You are critiquing your own work, which is a good habit for us to get into. What I'm seeing in this rendition is skin color that is more yellow than "normal" (to MY eyes). You have handled the coloration split in the original and made the top/bottom of her face similar tones, but they appear too yellow and too much the same all over (I mention this because that's what my first skin color repairs looked like although I didn't see it until other folks told me). If you painted over her face to make the differences between the top and bottom half match (which is what many of us do), it can make the face too even -- which is not normal. Doug Nelson has a post (way back somewhere) where he added some reddish/magenta tones to the nose, chin, cheeks and perhaps the forehead on a restoration which needed recoloring. Vikki (you've probably seen her work here -- professionally excellent at retouching AND coloration) has some tips here and on the internet--when you have some time to look/read. I added a selective color adjustment and reduced the yellow while reducing the cyan (which increases the red) -- didn't look much different. Then I added some reddish tones to her nose/cheeks etc., on a layer set to Color blend, blurred a bit and reduced the opacity so that it was just barely noticeable to me. Let me make this very clear -- this is NOT my strong area, and I'm just bringing up some options -- we'll see what my rendition looks like (sometimes they look better BEFORE we upload them on the forum ).

I think you kept her hair color the beautiful shade from the original -- nice! You can paint on some more lip color and/or add an Overlay blend layer and use a small brush to paint black over the lip to darken the color there - reduce the layer opacity to taste. I painted on a bit of color (on a Color blend layer) and also used an Overlay layer to add some saturation.

[chillin]

Originally Posted by AtlanaAnna

Chillin and CrazyFly1,

... Chillin', how did you deal with the 2 toned skin?!!!

Thanks,
Sylvia

I used the same method like crazyfly1. I add some feathering (3pix).

If you allow me to post again… I have tried the portraiture plug in on it.

[Kraellin]

sylvia, thank you.

yes, i think you're right about the florescencse. it is a bit. not sure that we're seeing exactly the same thing, but i do see it. i think i also left too much red in the blouse and i'm not real happy with the skin color on her hands.

on yours, the hands look good. the blouse is a believable white and the hair looks good, but it's the face coloration that looks off here. it's a bit too pale and somewhat monotone. you can see the color there but it's very faded. cj has some good suggestions there and i'll just add one. if you mask the face and then use a hue/sat on it, you shld be able to bring out the color more. if that doesnt do it, then i'd go with the spraypaint/airbrush on a color blend mode layer and a low opacity brush to add some more color to the areas cj mentioned.

it's a great picture and certainly worthy of some time

[Daviskw]

Hi Again Sylvia

If you don't want the canvas texture you could turn her into a little China Doll smudge.

Butch

[Kraellin]

well, i had to have another go at this. took the red out of the blouse that i had before and hopefully got rid of some of that florescense. i like the hand color better also.

i think if i were working this from scratch again, i'd go about it differently. i'd correct the face tones first, the same as before, but then i'd divide up the image into four parts, background, face/hair, blouse, and hands and work on each individually.

[AtlanaAnna]

C.J. Schwartz,

Thanks so much for that input! You're totally right about the face being too flat but I didn't know what to do. I love how you brought her face back to life and got some nice color in those lips! I think color is the hardest thing to learn how to deal with in Photoshop. I definiately will try to find Vikki's tips.

Sylvia

[AtlanaAnna]

Craig,

Much better! Definitely more natural looking and the hand color is good. Your blouse is gorgeous! I don't like my blouse at all. Because of the blouse, I may start completely over on my work. How did you approach dealing with the blouse? I've listened and tried the suggestions and I think I'm still too much of a novice to really comprehend what I'm suppose to do. The only thing I see that I would try to tweak in your latest rendition is the green overtones in the hair.

Sylvia

[CJ Swartz]

Sylvia, I'll post links to some of Vikki's tips here: (Vikki does things a bit differently than many of us -- she hand colors without using masks to "stay inside the lines", AND she doesn't even use extra layers to paint on (according to this old post anyway), but she is very experienced and gifted to boot. Starting out, I would suggest using masks to help you put the color where you want it, and layers set to Color blend mode to make it easier to "trash it and start over if you make a mistake" . When you get experience, then you can "wing it" and FLY!

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/res...i+colorization

http://www.pbase.com/vhansen/curious_about_color
http://www.pbase.com/vhansen/colorings

(Two of Vikki's PBase photo galleries that shows her colorizations of black/white photos -- sorry, no written tips included, but you can see what an excellent job looks like, and you could practice on the black/white versions if you downloaded them -- you couldn't post your versions anywhere, of course, because the b/w photos may be copyrighted.)

Vikki has written that she used this linked tutorial from Worth1000 when she started colorizing -- she has made changes and does her own version, but this is a helpful tutorial. This is for colorizing b/w images, but sometimes a color photo is so badly damaged that we end up turning it into a grayscale and colorize it to turn it back into a color photo, so this is still relevant to the subject. The current photo doesn't require that, although you might use it as practice?

[Kraellin]

sylvia, thanks

hmmm, how to explain this to someone using photoshop and having a little difficulty... basically, i made a selection of the blouse. i copied that selection to a new layer. then, i ran a hue/sat on that layer (i actually did this in a simpler fashion, but the overall result is the same). in the hue/sat you can set a given color as the one you wish to work on. for this last attempt i chose 'red'. i then desaturated, which removes the red and leaves only the white. i think i also brightened it just a touch.

just bear in mind that i also worked on this before. but, it was similar. only that time, i chose 'yellow' and removed the yellow.

as for the green in the hair, i dont really see it on the version posted here. i'll have to look at it in psp later. but again, this could be remove by using a selection on the hair and another hue/sat where i simply desaturated the green values.

[Daviskw]

You could always try adding a texture mask from another photo.. This will add some pores and allow the color to take better.
I applied a mask from my daughters picture... not the right res or shape but you could find one easily on the net.

Butch

[AtlanaAnna]

Daviskw,

Now this China Doll smudge is something I've never seen. Very interesting. It's pretty but also a little unnatural. Is this a plug-in?

Sylvia

[Daviskw]

Hi Sylvia

It is a common technique using smudge brushes at different opacities... It can make very striking renderings even with less than perfect focus and heavy texture.

Here is a link to a Tutorial...check it out you will like it.

Another example...

And yet another

Butch

[nitehawk]

I just checked on my version of photoshop {CS 1) and the edit log is under preferances. Good thing to know. I'm going to use it from now on. Thanks

Mike

[printmeister]

A hand coloured version.
I added a monochrome channel-mixer adjustment layer of 70 red, 20 green and 10 blue. This got rid of most of the two tone flesh colour.
Then it was just a case of adding curves adjustments for the colours.