Need help getting redness out

[Sportsgirl26]

Hey everyone - I am new to the world of retouching photos. I do not have Photoshop or any advanced photo editing software. (I tried to download a free trial of Photoshop Elements on my Macbook but the download didn't work).

Anyways, I have a photo that I am trying to work on for a friend - the person's face has some redness. I would like her face to match the neck/chest area. There is a noticeable difference.

Does anyone have any suggestions for any free software editing tools that I could use for this purpose? I will go ahead and post the picture - maybe if anyone has any free time and could work on it for me or give me any tips, I would be forever grateful!

[Daviskw]

Hi there

GIMP is a free program that does a good job.

Butch

[Sportsgirl26]

Thank you SO SO much Butch, that is exactly what I needed!! I really appreciate it!

I saw GIMP as an editing option, but it looked complicated to set up, with the X11 factor. It sounds like it's worth the time to check it out though.

Thanks again for your help!

[chillin]

Gimp is a good choice.

[Daviskw]

Good job chillin...I fought over whether to leave a little red...I think your version is best.

Butch

[moonchild64]

I hope you don't mind my playing a little.

I have no idea if my moniter is calibrated properly ... this looks fine on my computer ... but I don't know how it looks on others.

picture2.jpg
picture2MoonWeb1.jpg
picture2MoonWeb2.jpg

[Gary]

In CS4, I left a little red.

[Sportsgirl26]

You guys are all so talented - thank you so much!

[edgework]

Wrong analysis. The red is just fine. Which is to say, the magenta/green, yellow/blue plates have plenty of information. But look at your red plate. That's where the cyan information would come from and there's almost nothing there. And that's the problem. That's why her face is so flat. When you pull red out, you're just creating a face that's deficient in all the colors and removing even more detail. You need to engineer some cyan back into it, and you can't just do it with the Channel Mixer or Selective color, which will feed cyan into magenta making everything purple.

I used a workaround that leverages Photoshop's dot-gain compensation when you convert from RGB to CMYK. I duped the image, made one copy CMYK. If you compare the cyan plate, you'll see that it's even worse than the red. That's because Photoshop assumes a dot-gain on press and pulls the values back accordingly. Then I copied the red plate from the other image and pasted it into the cyan plate. This gives actual cyan information, pre dot-gain compensation. I actually converted and repeated three times, since the red plate was so weak. After that, you mask out the skin and apply curves to bring the now overloaded cyan/red values back into line.

http://edgework.tripod.com/samples/red_face.jpg