any ideas?

[paulus]

Hi

I've tried this pic from archives and I've got pretty much nowhere with it and wondered if people could point me in the direction of solving it

As you can see I stopped working on it when I stepped back and realised how rubbish it was and left the nose!

Thanks
Paul

[Juergen D]

Some D&B, mostly burning, around the eyes seems to help.

Juergen

[paulus]

Thanks Juergen,

Its better but I feel I've been very clumsy with the skin tone.
I've lost the life in the skin tone - there isn't the range in the tonality.

Cheers
Paul

[Juergen D]

Better?

Juergen

[chillin]

First I would try to recover some colors & after, take care of the texture. I posted a sample, you might find nicer colors. Use selective curves, levels & HSL adjustments to do that.

[paulus]

Hi Chillin,

Being cheeky - How do you adjust the HSL?
When I play with HSL that it always looks terrible.

Thanks
Paul

Hi Juergen,

I think as you've used something like my version the tones are off but its much better than my effort

Thanks
Cheers
Paul

[paulus]

Hi Chillin,

I've had a go using curves, levels and Colour Mechanic pro.
Is not the best but its as close as I can get to yours.

Still bits of green and purple floating around!

I must confess couldn't get the hair brown so I painted it in together with a bit of skin density

Cheers
Paul

[chillin]

Hi paulus, I have played with your picture a bit... do you have your screen calibrated?

[paulus]

Hi Chillin,

I've mislaid the screen thingy it needs to be re-calibrated as the screen pop-up keeps nagging me.

My version is over saturated as I tried to get near your version but with limited success - I don't think I understand curves as well as I thought!

The reason for the over saturation was I struggled with green colour tints as when I played with the skin tone it started to look a little green!

Any pointers for how to turn my rubbish version to your very good one?

Thanks again for your help
Cheers
Paul

[unimatrix001]

I thought the red channel was out of range. Used a channel mixer layer to reduce the red channel. A hue saturation to bring back some of the color. finally a color balance on the face to adjust the tones in the skin.

[Alison]

I was fiddlin with the image without an intention of posting the final result, so I have no particular order of work. Levels, Dodge and Burn, Cloning, Patch Tool, Hue/Sat Adjustments, Selective Colour Adjustments, Sharpening. I converted to Black and White as well to see what it looked like. Needs a bit more work.

[chillin]

Originally Posted by paulus

Hi Chillin,

......

Any pointers for how to turn my rubbish version to your very good one?

Thanks again for your help
Cheers
Paul

A quick curves sample. Replace the output values with the sample output numbers. You can take sample points from other photos.

[Gary]

Originally Posted by paulus

Hi

I've tried this pic from archives and I've got pretty much nowhere with it and wondered if people could point me in the direction of solving it

As you can see I stopped working on it when I stepped back and realised how rubbish it was and left the nose!

Thanks
Paul

Firstly, I started with color correction with curves using the white of the button and the pupil of his eye then onto getting the skin colors by painting on empty layers in color mode, curves to adjust saturation and contrast of these layers, etc. Each was selectively applied with a mask. I then extracted the subject to a new layer, placed a blank layer below, painted a BG and applied texture and sharpening.

Cheers!

[crfbillmann]

At first i did the colorcorrections according to a reference image of a little kid i found.

Then i did som d&b on the face an some recoloring on the clothes.

It´s quite difficult to get a result that doesn´t look to overdone and still naturally.

Regards,
Chris

Here is my try

[tom60634]

Used Color Mechanic to tone down the reds in photo. Then dust and scratches and a quick trip through noise ninja.

[paulus]

Wow,

Thanks to everybody who's contributed so far - I've got a lot to learn!
I'm currently playing with the curves from Chillin so hopefully I'll be able to put a better effort up shortly.

Thanks again to Tom, crfbillmann, Gary, Alison and unimatrix
Cheers
Paul