How would you handle this pic?

[TheTexan]

I have a client that wants her portrait to match his portrait so as to look like they were taken at the same sitting. I will match either his background to hers or visa versa. What Im interested in is how to get her image (her face and body) to have the same deep tone that his does. Hers is more contrasty and bright and washed out in places. How would some of you give her face and features the more subtle and warm tones his does. Im stumped.
Oh one other thing, the client likes the way his looks so that is my standard for changing the other.

http://www.texramp.net/~dcsas/match

Tex

[winwintoo]

Hi Tex, try duplicating the layer of her picture and setting the dups blending mode to multiply - it seems to bring the tone closer together.

Just a thought

Margaret

[Tim_S]

Well, Tex you sure have a tough row to hoe on this one. I tried experimenting around for about 20 minutes and this was the best I could do.

I made no attempt to match the yellowed tone, or the background. I just tried to get the facial tones to be similar to his and the overall quality of the light. The latter will never really happen, since the two pictures were taken with widely different illumination angles. I don't know how you are going to simulate the high angle light on his face with the much lower angle main light on hers. At least they are from the same side...

Anyway, here is what I did. After isolating the girl, duplicate the background layer and make a contrast mask, oops I didn't write down how much blur I used. anyway, Soft Light blend mode, 21% opacity. It still wasn't flat enough so I added a curves layer, with input 255 = 237 and input 132=100. That was better but her left cheek was still too bright, so I copied the background again and blended usin Linear Burn, add a Hide All Layer mask and use a brush at 10% opacity to paint white on to the mask over her cheek and throat to darken them. Still not enough, so I added another curves layer, this time with Input 15=15 and 196=167.

I hope my shorthand description isn't too opaque

I think with a lot of time and patients you could lighten and darken different parts of her face to better match the light angles, but her hair would be a real chore. Oh, don't miss the double catchlights in her eyes (he has only one).

Hope this helps
--tks

[jeaniesa]

I don't envy you in the least Tex! Wow, what a challenge.

Tim has got you off to a great start. I made one small change to his version by adding lighting effects. (In PS, Filter->Render->Lighting Effects.) This puts some highlights in her hair, but I think you'll need to make a selection of the lower half of the picture (or just the shoulders?) to get the highlights falling on them as well. What I did was use the "Omni" light type with the center of the light on the top edge of the photo. Other settings were:
Intensity 40
Gloss 4
Material -68
Exposure -14
Ambience 14

It lightened the face a bit as well, so if you don't want the light to affect the face, you will have to select the face, then inverse the selection so you won't touch it. (Just tried this real quick and that will definitely work! My attached example didn't do that though.)

Anyway, I think that you should be able to use the render lighting filter to create the extra light source you need.

Good luck!

Jeanie

[jeaniesa]

Also, don't forget that you can change the color of the light in the lighting effects dialog box by double clicking on the color patch (white square most likely).

And, there's a good chance that after running lighting effects filter that the highlights will be mismatched. This article contains some helpful hints on how to get the highlights to match.

Jeanie

[Guest]

I think Tim and Jen did well on this. One thing, I would consider while doing this one. The young man could have a tan from working out doors, which wouldn't necessarily look good on the girl.

[Guest]

Originally posted by fugitive
I think Tim and Jen did well on this. One thing, I would consider while doing this one. The young man could have a tan from working out doors, which wouldn't necessarily look good on the girl.

Maybe, but for whatever reason he definitely has darker skin than she has. Not to mention she is wearing makeup on her skin, which also will make hers look different from his.

As for Tim's attempt, the contrast still looks pretty far off. Jen did seem to get much closer...in fact you'd be tempted to say it was right on. However, she worked with the original backgrounds, one light and the other dark. This fools the eye into thinking that the tones are the same when actually they aren't. I put Jen's pic into PS and removed the light background from the man's pic then overlapped him onto her pic--you can really see how the eye was fooled! Now you can see that the contrast is still way off, which you would have found out when you put the pics together anyway, so why not do that first and save time and effort?

I am posting the pic that Jen did, not to be nasty or critical, but to illustrate this important point. Hope that's okay with you, Jen.

Phyllis

[jeaniesa]

Phyllis,

No problem reposting my pic - it's very useful to see the highlight problem. I didn't post my version to be the final solution - I was just trying to show how you could use the lighting effects to get another source of light on the picture.

I thought about removing the background on both photos too - don't know why I didn't mention it. But, I did give that link for "making highlights match" - which was meant to help solve at least part of the problem you show by combining the two images. I just didn't explain the reason I posted that link as well as you did.

Jeanie (not Jen )

[Guest]

A match made in Photoshop

Tex,

First of all, the customer is NOT always right. So ignore what he says about making HER tone match HIS (Isn't that just like a man!). Both of these photos had bad contrast, just in opposite directions. The truth is somewhere inbetween, and if you give him a good result, he won't say, "Hey, I don't look flat and drab enough!" He will just say "Awesome, man!" and gladly recommend you to all his friends!

I won't enumerate all the steps I went through to do this job, but here are some important basics to make mismatched faces match.

Put both pics in same layer. Remove all color by going to grayscale mode then back to RGB to have access to more PS features. You can make it sepia as the final step if you like, but work in grays.

Now go to curves and use the eyedropper to see numerical values for darkest shadows and brightest cheek highlights. Make them match as closely as you can.

Separate the layers and remove each person from the background (I only removed her, and left him on his background, which I stretched behind her...but then I don't have to print it). Put a gradient fill in the background layer behind them both. Whatever you do, DON'T try to adjust them with their separate backgrounds, since those have different intensities and will fool the eye into thinking one area is brighter/darker than it really is! Best to work on them together with same background anyway, since this is how they will end up. So go ahead and resize them and put them into their final pose at this point, in different layers of course.

Now examine the lighting. Her picture was taken with three lights (hair, and two main lights off to each side) and his with only two lights (hair, one main frontal light). This is a problem, and if you don't fix it, they will not look like they belong together no matter what else you do. So lighten his neck and ear...etc...and generally give him the same two-sided light that she has. Remove some of that heavy shadow under his nose. Brighten his shirt...that helped a lot to make them compatible! Darken or lighten shadows (with large fuzzy burn and dodge tools) on each to make them more alike. Walk away for ten minutes and come back and look at it fresh--you will see another area that needs work.

One thing that helped was using b/c to darken and lessen contrast overall on her, then selecting an area including her face, hitting "command/control-J" to put it on a layer above, then using b/c to give back some contrast, erasing parts of this new layer with a large fuzzy eraser to blend it in. This gave the cheeks and mouth more highlights and definition. You will have to do it more than once, of course. But putting selected areas on new layers (the half-washed-away mouth, for example) to adjust them is the easiest and fastest way to tweak the tones.

Now check the eyes. Do this by selecting a pair with a loop then hitting "command/control-J." Move this new layer over to the other person. See how well the eyes match in tone and contrast. The eyes are very important and must match, so work on them till they do. In the process, you will have clues to what else needs to be done to the faces that own those eyes.

There is a lot of fine tuning to be done to make them fit together, of course. One thing is certain, however, this involves some retouching, which is an art. If it were as simple as just adjusting some PS features like levels or curves etc. over the whole picture, then anyone could do it and they wouldn't need to come to us!

One last thing. I would ask for a snapshot of the two of them together at any age, just to see how the head sizes compare. You can guess, but it's better to know.

Phyllis

[Tim_S]

Wow, Phyllis. Many lessons there. I really like the trick of moving the eyes...

That goes in my file of PS tips.

--tks

[Mig]

I didn't realize how difficult this was until I tried it. Could've been used as a good challenge.

What the others recommended is all good. The link Jeaniesa posted is a good one.

What' I'd recommend is try to push both pictures towards one another, keeping what's fixable and tossing what's not. The girl is too bright and I doubt you'd be able to move the good from him over to the bad for her, so you might want to consider a compromise.
To get this result I desaturated the picture, first selecting the girl's picture, going to channel mixer, then to the guy's and doing the same. If you don't know how to turn a colour pic into b&w this way then just use hue/saturation or even desturate if you have to. The colour can be put in at the end.
Next you need to reduce the contrast of her, probably the best way is to use curves, but you can use whatever you're comfortable with, even brightness/contrast. Do the same with him, always trying to match them up by eye. You'll get more detailed later.
These more global changes start to push both pictures closer to one another in appearance.
An important part of all this is the info pallette. By opening up this pallette and running your cursor over different parts of the picture you can read the numbers for brightness (B). This is very important. If the readout for his left cheek is 80, then that's the neighbourhood you want for her left cheek and so on... You want to vaguely match them in different areas for brightness, especially their cheeks, nose, chin, neck and parts of their hair.
Keep making changes to the pic until the numbers more or less match up.
To help with this, add a layer of 50% gray edit>fill>50% gray and change the blend mode of this layer to soft light. Then dodge and burn the layer. This is a big key to matching these two people, dodge and burn.
Put a bg in behind them that more or less looks the same.
Add some colour.
This is a very difficult fix so don't be discouraged. Just keep experimenting. If you have any questions pm me.
This took about an hour, it was quite difficult.

Mig

[Guest]

Nice job, Mig. I especially like how you brought out the detail in her mouth. The only thing that bothers me is that in bringing them "together" he got a bit feminized with softer smoother skin as if he, too, is wearing make up. Perhaps layer-blending back some of his original skin texture would take care of that though.

Phyllis

[TheTexan]

You guys are good, really good. This just goes to prove that you learn by watching. I did a luminosity mask and curved the shadows to be more consistant across her face then I used the lighting effects trick to make the lighting more interesting then I did similar to his. I would like some advise on how to colorize the pics. I think I should bring both to an even start of desat or grayscale and colorize them equally. But Im not sure how to reintroduce the yellow/sepia cast across the entire pic. And Im not refering to the background at all. Ill just place that there when this is all done.

By the way, my ideas havent produced a perfect match but Im still experimenting with it. I am convinced however after trying some of these out that getting a near perfect match is doable. Its just hitting on the magic formula.

I have always said "With Photoshop, if you can imagine it, it can be done."

Any other help would be appreciated.

Tex

[dcarr]

I found the red channel in both were the closest in consistency. I deleted the other channels. I extracted him and placed him on a new layer. Then added a gradient matching hers. I adjusted the curves then experimented with tritones, since he liked his version.
Then I applied the tritones to her and I think it softened her a bit. On my screen she looks closer to him now. There were many other tones that looked good as well, but I stopped with this one

[chiquitita]

I did this before I read the last sentence where you said you wanted to match to the guy rather than the woman. Oh well.. anyway....