How to achieve these vivid colours?

[toggster]

Hi all,

I'm new here and have a question I am hoping people won't mind helping me with? I love the colour photos here: http://meninenuotrauka.lt/lt/portraits/ and while my skintones are gradually getting good, I am having real problems recreating the same punchy but not too saturated colours and wondered if some kind soul might be able to have a look and give me a few pointers?

Thanks very much in advance!

Toggster

[mshi]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Hi all,

I'm new here and have a question I am hoping people won't mind helping me with? I love the colour photos here: http://meninenuotrauka.lt/lt/portraits/ and while my skintones are gradually getting good, I am having real problems recreating the same punchy but not too saturated colours and wondered if some kind soul might be able to have a look and give me a few pointers?

Thanks very much in advance!

Toggster

There are no secrets. All you need to do is to take a good look at Histogram.

[Aladdin]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

LAB color!
Search it.

[toggster]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Thanks very much for your responses, I've recently started exploring LAB so great to know i'm on the right lines!

[Aladdin]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

This one will give you the straight answer you are looking for http://digital-photography-school.co...with-photoshop

[voidsource]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

this is very interesting. I knew of lab colour but didnt really fiddle with it. Nice technique.

[Aladdin]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

LAB by itself is not an easy subject to tackle, however, it is one of the most important color space. It offers ways to deal with color and luminosity that no other color space allows, this is due to the fact that LAB offers separation between "lightness" and colors, you can easily work on one aspect "color" without affecting luminosity, the opposite is true.
The link above is good example, the simple S curve in the Lightness channel created simple contrast without affecting the colors, however, tweaking the colors, did not affect the lightness.

This is a simple intro to LAB http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p...ite/lab-color/

[andrewrodney]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Lab IS an important color model, designed years and years before the Knoll brothers had Photoshop idea in their heads. Before digital retouching was even a consideration.

There are tons and tons of edits that seem to require Lab but don't. The Luminosity blend mode will produce many of the same results without converting to Lab which when done in 8-bit per color, depending on the original color space will reduce tones and data unnecessarily. Lab is an excellent read-out for color work, but there is zero reason to have to convert to Lab to get this useful set of color numbers.

Might I suggest reading the posts going on right now at LuLa on the subject and the results others have seeing:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=77754.0

It covers this unnecessary use of the Lab S curve and further, the place it makes far more sense to make such an edit (in the raw converter).

The Lab color model has been way over sold. There are uses yes, and the numbers are excellent for analysis since it's device independent. But the idea of willy nilly converting into and out of Lab isn't usually necessary, without high bit data, it's down right insulting to the image data. Plus it takes time which is useful if you change by the hour <g>

Lab has a number of warts too. While it was hopped to be perceptually uniform, it isn't. Hence the blue to magenta shift seen commonly.

[andrewrodney]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Here's a video on correcting skin tones without having to resort to CMYK but it does use the Lab feedback (or RGB):

Low Rez (YouTube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWaFDKrNrwc

High Rez

http://digitaldog.net/files/SkinToneVideo.mov

[voidsource]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Saw the video and i must say that is very informative and was not aware about the cmyk and lab info covered on there. After seeing the video i went back on some images of myself with like at the beach and i see the great difference once i did the hue and saturation slider. Much more accurate i would say.
Now forgive me for my ignorance ( as i know not much about this ) but when editing the skin in lab mode and whatnot how does this affect it once i go to print it? If i were to print on five different printers or X number of printers will this be affected differently ( color wise ) per printer? Or is lab only good for online imaging and such?

[andrewrodney]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

...when editing the skin in lab mode and whatnot how does this affect it once i go to print it? If i were to print on five different printers or X number of printers will this be affected differently ( color wise ) per printer? Or is lab only good for online imaging and such?

You correct for the master in an RGB working space. Then you load a soft proof of one of the five output needs and if necessary create output specific adjustment layers based on that soft proof. Easier to do in Lightroom thanks to a true before and after preview. You can just create a duplicate of the master image in PS, view it as such (your Before), then edit on the original, don't save the dupe after corrections. I'd place these output specific edits in a layer set with the name of the output profile used and it's rendering intent. Save off an iteration with everything baked into single layer doc, ideally in output color space based on the profile you used for soft proofing. Send that to (fill in the blank).

[voidsource]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

Ah ok, so lab mode seems then it is just a mode to work in but not really to print on. If i were to go to print i would have to switch to rgb mode and then try to match rgb to my soft proof, correct? If not then im more confused than i thought i was.
Thanks for that info though.

[andrewrodney]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

There is no such thing as either a Lab capture or output device. A device may feed you Lab data but it's been converted from RGB if a capture device.

[voidsource]

Re: How to achieve these vivid colours?

ah alright. thanks for clearing that up.