Help/Horrible flash problem

[tjohnson]

Hello,
I am very new to photoshop and retouchpro. I have read quite a bit and need some help.
I took some pictures at a wedding reception and didn't have a flash.
I purchased an action on line to help but it didn't. I looked at the color correction tutorial on this forum but couldn't fix it. I tried the dup of the lightness lab channel to the blue channel but that didn't help.
Is this hopeless?? Any ideas are soooo welcome.
Thank you in advance, Tracy

[Doug Nelson]

You have no blue channel to speak of, so I created one via a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. I set the Blue output channel to R 0, G 200, B 0, and left the Red and Green output channels alone.

Then I made a Curves adjustment layer and adjusted RGB curve to taste, then each individual color curve, then readjusted RGB curve and each individual color curve again.

That's it.

The nice thing about this is you can open all your bad images from that same shoot in PS and drag these two adjustment layers onto them and you won't have to redo them all individually.

[Doug Nelson]

Here's a teeny little version of your image with the adjustment layers. They're resolution independent, so you can simply drag them onto your original. They probably won't work unedited because I was working with a low-rez JPG version, but it will give you an idea.

[KenB]

Wow....this one was tough. The blue channel was virtually not there. I tried a curves adjustment before I looked at the channels and that did not work at all. So, I replaced the blue channel with the lightness channel from a duped photo, converted to lab mode.
After I did that a curves adjustment layer was workable.

Ken

[Doug Nelson]

Just to see what would happen, I tried this same exercize in Elements. First I tried dragging over the adjustment layers I posted previously. That worked, but they aren't editable.

So, I set about exploring this problem in plain, vanilla Elements (that is, sans Richard's excellent Hidden Power Tools).

The image looks pretty much like my original, so I'll just post the layer stack.

First I duped the background layer, then made a new empty layer set to color mode, filled it with 255 blue (pure blue) and set blending mode to color. Then I merged down.

This left me with a black and blue image layer (see stack), which I set to color mode and lowered opacity. This filled in some of the missing blue information.

Then I added a levels adjustment layer and worked on individual colors.

[Doug Nelson]

By the way. Ken's turned out better than either of mine.

[KenB]

Originally posted by Doug Nelson
By the way. Ken's turned out better than either of mine.

Actually I think both Doug's version and mine are quite alike with Doug's being a little more saturated is all. That's one thing I'm never sure of, the amount of saturation. Is there a way to know, other than eyeballing it?

Ken

[Doug Nelson]

Without getting into color theory and printing gamut (and I try not to get into those if I can avoid it) eyeballs are as good as anything

Most of the cues we use to decide under/over for saturation are going to be in the midtones anyway, which eliminates gamut as a factor.

It's an interesting question, though. Feel free to start a thread over in Input/Output if you really want to pursue it.

[roger_ele]

Tracy

This was facinating, starting with the ideas of Doug and Ken, I tried a couple of experiments on the blue channel, rather than throwing away the blue channel I used the info that was in it. In both cases after building up the blue channel I used eyedropper on the white and black and balanced the white and black with a leves adjustment layer, then fine tuned with curves. This is what I did to the blue channel on the first one;

1) Selected the blue channel, Used Apply Image from Merged in Screen mode, I think I did this two or three times to build up the channel.

[roger_ele]

the second way;

when I tried this straight it gave a solarized affect lightening the black tux in the blue channel, so I went back and started by selecting the brightness, then saving the selection so that I would have a mask.

1) Selected Blue channel, instead of Merged as the source I changed it to the almost non-existant blue channel. Still in screen blending mode. Selected mask and selected the selection I had made and saved for the mask.

2) Ran this four or five times until I thought I had built up enough density.

I didn't adjust overall brightness in either one, just color balance.

This was interesting, Thanks. Roger

[tjohnson]

You guys are amazing

Thank you so much....now I need to go back and work some more...I tried the lightness channel and I guess I need to read some more on the curves part. Mine just dosen't look that good.
Do you think that I could apply some sort of dimming affect to soften it at all?

[LQQKER]

Hey all,

I made a repair on the blue channel by doing a similar adjustment to Dougs, that is, making a mixer adjustment to the existing blue channel. I kept the settings the same, that is green 200% blue and red at zero. I seem to have better results using levels over curves, but I guess that is subjective. Anyhow, I did a levels adjustment on each individual channel and then did a color balance to taste.