Help, efficiency question! D&B (50% softlight)

[Andrew Lawrence]

Ok, so tonight I have to do some beauty retouching on a friend's older (much slower laptop) I won't be doing much color critical stuff till I get back to my fast home computer because the one I'll be working on is not calibrated but I figured I could get a lot of dodging and burning done on the face to smooth it out.

Here's my plan, I'll cut out a smaller portion (cropping it) of just the face, then use that smaller cropped document to work on the slower computer dodging and burning with 50 soft light. Then later, I'll drag that document along with it's 50% gray layer back onto the much larger uncropped photo, and the image will snap back to where it is and then I just delete the cropped-in layer leaving the dodge and burn, then I'll finnish up the rest of the outlying layers when I'm at my fast home computer.

The computer I have to work on tonight is so slow and probably will crash if I try to work on the larger photo. With this idea I can work on a file size of 60MB instead of 140MB.

I've tested it and it looks like it works without a problem. But I wanted to throw it out there to you guys. Is there anything I should worry about with this? I know it's complicated and ridiculous......

Do you guys see any problems I might have to think about?

[mistermonday]

Andrew, that should work fine as long as your woring colorspace and your color management set up is the same for both computers (or you make the appropriate conversions when you transfer from file to file).
Regards, Murray

[Andrew Lawrence]

Originally Posted by mistermonday

Andrew, that should work fine as long as your woring colorspace and your color management set up is the same for both computers (or you make the appropriate conversions when you transfer from file to file).
Regards, Murray

Yeah seems to be working fine so far....

It's so much better than working on the larger files.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Everything worked fine, only snag I ran into was merging the 50% gray softlight layers into larger ones, but found out it all depends on what layer is on top or bottom when merging, weird, don't understand that one.....

Anyone know how I take my own thread down so it doesn't clog up the forum?

[girlsfather]

[QUOTE=Andrew Lawrence;241857]Everything worked fine, only snag I ran into was merging the 50% gray softlight layers into larger ones, but found out it all depends on what layer is on top or bottom when merging, weird, don't understand that one.....

instead of:
create 50% grey layer under your smaller one
set blending mode to normal for both
select smaller layer and merge down
change blending mode to softlight again

you could select the transparent areas in your "smaller" layers and fill with 50% gray

In times when computers were much slower it was quite common to work on parts of the image.

[Andrew Lawrence]

[QUOTE=girlsfather;241864]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

Everything worked fine, only snag I ran into was merging the 50% gray softlight layers into larger ones, but found out it all depends on what layer is on top or bottom when merging, weird, don't understand that one.....

instead of:
create 50% grey layer under your smaller one
set blending mode to normal for both
select smaller layer and merge down
change blending mode to softlight again

you could select the transparent areas in your "smaller" layers and fill with 50% gray

In times when computers were much slower it was quite common to work on parts of the image.

Thanks! Yeah I didn't even think of selecting the transparent area and filling.

Yeah, I've also had someone tell me that they res down and convert to 8 bit for all of their non-masking adjustment layers and then just drag all of that over to the larger file. They were doing 8X10 negatives in a drum scanner and they had really outdated computers.....

[Flashtones]

[QUOTE=Andrew Lawrence;241890]

Originally Posted by girlsfather

Yeah, I've also had someone tell me that they res down and convert to 8 bit for all of their non-masking adjustment layers and then just drag all of that over to the larger file.

In my experience 8 bit masks carry over fine to 16 bit images, so feel free to mask your adjustement layers before dragging them over.

[Andrew Lawrence]

[QUOTE=Flashtones;241906]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

In my experience 8 bit masks carry over fine to 16 bit images, so feel free to mask your adjustement layers before dragging them over.

That makes sense, there's no color changes or anything with moving it around?

[Flashtones]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

That makes sense, there's no color changes or anything with moving it around?

We used to do this all the time before PS could handle 16-bit adj layers. We'd work on a proxy 8-bit image, get it where we wanted, then transfer the adjustments over to the 16-bit file.

A mask is just a grayscale image. An 8-bit mask contains anywhere from 1 to 256 shades of gray. All of those tones are retained when moving from an 8-bit to 16-bit image. If your 256 tone mask works sufficiently well for your 8-bit image it's more than likely it will work equally well for your 16-bit image.