Pascal Dangin & Box Studios

[seattle-light]

Sorry to go on and on like that.

[garibaldi]

Originally Posted by seattle-light

Dear Vapour...


How does Ferrari make such amazing cars?

.

chewing gum and duct tape

[seattle-light]

And Garibaldi speaks from experience and a position of some authority on this matter.

[garibaldi]

haha that is true. Lest I say That Box studio also runs on Apple 2c+'s , Photoshop 1, and lots of pure colombian coke too lol!

[jaduffy007]

Originally Posted by vapour

Thank you for understanding.

When I have a problem like that I just ignore it and get my "carving" or dodge and burning done. Get a good nice shape, then go in and fix those discolored areas afterwards with a Curve adjustment layer. So just lasso (with a nice feather) that area that is reddish and bring up a Curve lum and bring down the red channel.

Vapour / ShadowLight...thank you!

[seattle-light]

I think that jaduffy007 has a really great point here. So many times we get so caught up in wanting to use the latest, most advanced methods that we spend more time focused on the technique than if we just did it the old-fashioned way. The direct approach has its advantages at times -- no need to create a unified field theory just to clean up an image.

There are lots of different ways to skin a cat (not that I'm doing a lot of cat skinning mind you, but that's what all my cat-skinning friends tell me).

In the end most of it comes down to having a plan in your mind and then pursuing it with persistence. Image work is just a matter of changing the luminosity and color of pixels to achieve that end and there are loads of different ways to go about doing that. There's no one approach that works for everything, but for anything you want to do there are an endless number of different paths to get there.

Sometimes brute force works and sometimes calculations are called for. Sometimes it's better to copy and paste pieces together, and sometimes it's better to liquefy. Every different approach has its place and its limitations. But from what I've seen over the years pretty much everyone is doing things quite differently. Some shops have a more consistent working methods (but that's only because the people need to work on each other's files).

Some techniques are amazing when one person uses them but complete duds in the hands of others. Seek out methods that help solve the problems that you're facing and use methods that you understand and feel comfortable working with. And then keep seeking to solve problems until you run out of problems to solve.

It took me years to trust that the healing brush could actually be used as a professional tool (and in the meantime they made some major improvements to it), but now I don't know how I worked without it. And I stayed with an older version of Photoshop for years because I didn't like some of the changes (which were made for things I didn't use or need for the kinds of work I was doing -- sometimes changes aren't advancements).

Sometimes you need to use a masked inverted high pass filter, but sometimes a localized Curves adjustment will do the trick, and sometimes it makes more sense to dodge and burn. And sometimes you can just paint at a low opacity to fix a problem. It's a matter of looking at what's in front of you and figuring out what you're trying to accomplish. That decision-making process is what separates the best retouchers from the merely competent.

There are a lot of people out there doing high-end retouching who aren't using any complicated methods (various adjustment layers, dodging and burning). Just using their passion for transforming an image with some persistence, incredible attention to detail and commitment to doing high quality work. And then there are others who are turning the process into an abstruse mathematical/physics experiment.

We should all learn to appreciate that not everyone needs to be on the exact same path.

Hope you are doing well. Take care. Alan.