Critique AKJ

[akj]

Hello Everyone,

Could you take a peek at the image I've uploaded (yes, this is me and mom on my happy day). In my quest to get rid of the color cast and fix skin tones I've created bizarre green areas in my veil and at the bottom of my dress. Any ideas on how to get rid of this? I placed the subjects on a green background hoping it might hide the problem a bit, but it still bothers me (of course). :p

I basically followed the same steps as Katrin in Chapter 7--Recreating Backgrounds--except I slapped a green color layer over her grey background (I feel like such a cheater).

I'll also post the original image so you can take a peak at that too if you're interested. Any other suggestions would be appreciated also.

Thanks

Amanda

[akj]

Hey--where'd my picture go? Oh well--here's the after:

[akj]

And here's before:

[T Paul]

Okay, I’ll take a stab at this. Did you also follow Katrin Eismann’s tip in chapter 7 for creating a drop shadow? If so, my guess is that your green cast might be from the drop shadow layer your created. Is your drop shadow layer UNDER the layer that has the bride? Also, you need to add a drop shadow to your mom as right now she is floating above your background. If that’s not it, you could select the area in question and make an adjustment layer and try a color correction. Well, that’s my guess. By the way, you made a beautiful bride.

-T

[Doug Nelson]

When you masked the image, did you perhaps have some 'holes' in the mask? This sometimes leads to unintended seethrough portions. This can also happen when using selection tools with too much feathering.

If this was the case, a red background will cause a red cast, blue will cause blue cast, etc.

[Vikki]

My guess is, your problem lies with the masking, or rather lack of it. I doesn't appear that you masked off the areas you wanted to keep, before appling the green.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with masking, but if you think it's worth a shot, check out this simple tutorial about masking:
Quick Mask Tutorial

[akj]

Thanks for the info guys--I thought I did an OK good with masking but maybe I need to re-check things. I did the example from Katrin's book a couple times and that seemed to turn out OK. But now that I'm working with color perhaps my lack of experience is showing. :p

Tutorial looks good Vikki--I'm going to check it out as soon as I get a minute.

Doug: What I did for the mask was I made a rough outline around me and my mom with the lasso tool and then converted the selection to a mask--and then fixed the edges with the paintbrush. I had a small feather--maybe 1. I'd never heard of holes with masking. Sounds frightening.

T--Good point about the drop shadows. I'll check that out.

I'll let you know how it goes. Moving over to Photoshop . . .

Amanda

[akj]

For those of you interested, I've uploaded a picture of my dog that I've tinkered with. This is a very basic picture. I'd like to get more complicated--make specialized backgrounds, collages, etc. but I thought I'd better start from the ground up. Any suggestions to make this picture more "interesting" or is simple better?

Amanda

[Doug Nelson]

To check for 'holes' in your mask, doubleclick on the quickmask icon and set the opacity to 100% (you'll probably want to leave it at 50% for day-to-day work). Set the color to something that contrasts with your work (red is traditional). Any area that shows any degree of this color will have a corresponding degree of masking.

Masks are essentially just a grayscale image stored either in the memory (a quickmask) or as a separate channel (alpha channels). They have all the characteristics and editability of any other image, including levels of transparency.

If you're using too big a brush, too soft a brush, or too big a feathering amount you can leave semi-transparent 'halos' around your masks. These can cause all sorts of unexpected results.

Just remember, as with all PS tools, depending on your setting, you can be affecting a much larger area than indicated, even when using 'precise' cursors.

[akj]

Thanks Doug--that clears things up. Perhaps I need a mask to cover up the "holes" in my brain.

Amanda

[akj]

In regards to the wedding photo--I've checked the mask and there are no holes to speak of. I turned off the drop shadow and this doesn't have any effect on the bottom of the dress. It's still green. Any other ideas?

Amanda

[Mig]

Hi akj,

Unfortunately you need to start from scratch but the fix is quite easy. If you know how to use adjustment layers, use those, but if you don't, then just bring up the Levels dialogue box and look for the three eyedroppers. Choose the middle one by clicking it, and then take the eye dropper with your mouse over to the picture and click this eyedropper onto a very dark spot in the picture, in this case you'd click the rug. Without leaving Levels yet, return to the Levels dialogue box and click on the eyedropper to the right (the 3rd one), then take it and click onto a very bright spot in your picture. In this case, click the eyedropper on your dress. You'll see an instant change. Click ok in the Levels dialogue box, you're done with it.
You should learn this method and use it on all your scans - trust me, I do this all day.

To fix the slight green colour cast that still remains, go to Select>Color Range and click on the eyedropper in this dialogue box and click onto the picture where you want to make a selection, in this case ideally click just beside your left ear, on the bridal thing.
Still in Colour Range, you'll see a Fuzziness slider in the dialogue box, move the slider to about center and click ok.
Feather this selection by several pixels, say 5.
You've now selected the portion of the picture that has unwanted colour. It's oversaturated and unattractive and shouldn't be there, so remove it by bringing up the Hue/Saturation dialogue box and move the Saturation slider to the left, to about -80 or so. (There are other ways to make this selection but this way is fast and fairly accurate.)

In the sample pic I'm trying to post, I also made a quick selection of the mirror with the polyhoweveryouspell that, then went thru the same hue/sat thing.

It's still not perfect but you'll get the idea. You want to make as few moves as you can when colour correcting - it should be as quick and global as you can make it, without too many complicated selections - the more you do, and the more you degrade the picture till it's mush. It's a long explanation but I'm hoping others will read this too and learn the technique, at least with the Levels box. People don't seem to know about this trick and it will do in two minutes what most people fumble over for two hours.

Good Luck!

[akj]

Wow Mig--thanks for the great post! I used Levels to originally correct the color cast in the image. I usually first go to Image--Adjust--Threshold, and then use the slider to find the darkest and lightest portions of the image (I'm bad at guessing where they are ) Using the eyedropper tool, I hold Shift (not sure what that is for Mac) and click on the dark and light areas. I then Cancel out of threshold. Then I go to Levels and use these same points to mark the highlight and shadow points.

I've haven't done much with color range so I will definitely give that a try--sounds (and looks) like it's just what I need. I will surely post the results if it comes out good!

Thanks again

Amanda

[akj]

OK, I tried the color range thingy as Mig described and it seemed to do a real good job of getting rid of the green on my veil. Thanks Mig! Luckily I didn't have to start over after all. I had less luck with the bottom of the dress. I could only come up with something that basically looked like a grayscale version of the bottom of the dress so I just left that part as is. (didn't want to tinker with too many things).

Also added a drop shadow to the bottom of my Mom (thanks T Paul). This helped a bit--she still seems to be floating there though--maybe I should work on adding more of a shadow to the rest of her?

Anyway,

Here is an updated version.

Thanks all for your help.

Amanda

[Doug Nelson]

Your mom is physically a little bit behind you in your original, but supposedly side-by-side in the new version, which is what's causing the 'floating mother' effect

It should be easy enough to cut her out and skootch her down a bit. Nice clean line where she meets your dress.