Toning down water ripples

[gladesman]

Need more advice. I tried to tone down the water ripples using soft mode and 50% grey, but all it does is make the ripples more grey with a blue tint. Is there any way to retain a bit of the water's color in the ripples?
The first image is my so-far finished attempt, and the second is a piece of the untouched raw file.

[alanH2o]

i dont really have a solution to get the right color when you are burning on a 50% grey layer apart from paint with a color apart from black normally helps.
My solution would be to clone out the ripples then adjust the opacity of the layer to let has much or little show acording to taste.

i have done part of your picture to give you the idea

[crazyfly1]

Hmmm, I had a couple ideas, thought it would be easy with shadow highlight or patch tool on a luminocity layer. Not so. I'll get back to you on this.

[crazyfly1]

OK this is what I came up with. If you use the red channel and just hit the "load channel as selection button you get a great selection" of what you want to dim. Make that a mask and then with the mask selected bring the levels command up and bring down the darks and bring up the lights till you get a good mask. (sorry if you know about channel masking already) At this point you can play with the blend modes, I found that exclusion on a low 13% opacity did a nifty job with little or no color shift.. hope this helps.

[holgaman]

I just tried the shadows/highlights on a second layer with a black mask and painted in the ripples. The layer was set to luminosity to keep the color.

[0lBaldy]

I copied the layer, used Image>Adjustments>Replace Color.
The settings after clicking on the highlights were :
Fuzziness 93 Hue -67 Saturation +10 Lightness -54

Masked the layer and painted the bird black

[gladesman]

Thanks for all the suggestions. They all work of course, but I pretty much settled on holgaman's shadow/highlights and mask and luminosity mode. It seemded to fit my skill level best. I also sampled a color and applied that to the whitest ripples although sparingly.

Crazyfly1, your method intrigues me with the red channel selection, but You lost me at making a mask and then bringing up levels. I tried a number of ways but couldn't make levels respond after making a layer mask.
Could you enlighten me on this procedure?

[holgaman]

Crazyfly,
I love your solution, much less fussy than mine. The exclusion blending is something that never occurred to me, very cool. I know about making selections from channels, but for some reason don't think about trying that route first. Thanks, man.

[W.Smith]

Originally Posted by gladesman

[...] the second is a piece of the untouched raw file.

Huh? "Untouched RAW file"?
All I see is a 96KB, 800x533 pixel, medium compressed (1:17) JPG file...
Hardly a RAW file.

[0lBaldy]

Originally Posted by gladesman

the second is a piece of the untouched raw file.

Originally Posted by W.Smith

Huh? "Untouched RAW file"?
All I see is a 96KB, 800x533 pixel, medium compressed (1:17) JPG file...
Hardly a RAW file.

LOLO @ W.Smith... May not be A raw file but Prob is a piece of one

[crazyfly1]

holgaman and gladesman, thank you for your interest and comments. gladesman, we are just creating a luminence mask (and I'm lousy at tutorials so bare with me).
I'm in CS3, everything will be basically the same with slight variations in the diferent editions of photoshop.
From the top; create a new layer and make sure the new layer is active. Now in the channels pallet click on the red channel so only it is active and selected. Now click the "load channel as selection" icon at the bottem of the channels pallet (image 1).
Now click the rgb channel to make all channels active and go back to the layers pallet. Click on the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers pallet. Now you should have a mask on the background layer you created.
K, I think this is where we pick up at. Alt click on the layer mask, now you are working on just the mask. "image", "adjustments", "levels" brings up a levels comand that will only effect your mask. Now just bring in your sliders to close the contrast on your mask, lightening the shiny ripples a bit and darkening the rest, apply (second image). You can do about anything to your mask from here, if you need to select the bird and fill with black or if you want to get real detailed and burn down specific areas and dodge others.
Now just click on the background layer and change the blend mode to difference (or multiply, or exclusion, whaterver works for you) and lower the opacity to get the look you want. If you need to you can always go in and make adjustments to your mask. You can also try all the other great suggestions for taking down the shine like applying the shadow highlight filter.

[W.Smith]

Originally Posted by 0lBaldy

LOLO @ W.Smith... May not be A raw file but Prob is a piece of one

Yup, a piece of a RAW file maybe, who knows, but de facto as a JPG file...

[gladesman]

crazyfly1,
This was an easy to follow tutorial, one of the posts that make this site great.
Really like Exclusion mode for this. I didn't realize it would leave the rest of the image alone like it does. Thanks.