How to get this look

[Produktak]

Heloo to all,

please could anyone advice me how to get similiar look?

http://500px.com/photo/48441104
http://500px.com/photo/32342207

Many thanks

Regards

Petr

[Aladdin]

Re: How to get this look

It is too late in the day for me to go on a rant, I will give you some guidelines:

There are two adjustments to what you see, one is local, affects skin, hair, eyes, etc..
then, there is global adjustment, done after the local, it affects the overall look of the image, some masks might be used on the global adjustment to lessen the effect on the local one.

The local adjustment is just curves, selective color, color balance and such. Same goes for global adjustment. Trust me, selective color is very under used tool. Not all the adjustments are used in "normal" mode, you might want to experiment with other modes like color, softlight, etc, etc, adjust opacity as desired.

[Produktak]

Re: How to get this look

Hello,

many thanks for you hints - I know tools you mentioned bud I cant get similiar results. Please could you advice me how to achieve this great brown-painted look? Is it selectice color method ?

Thank you for your patience

Regards

Petr

[Aladdin]

Re: How to get this look

Utilizing the various tools I mentioned above is the right way to go about achieving the desired tone, however, it takes a lot of experience and a lot of work to find the right combination of settings for all the tools.

Here is a shortcut to achieve the same, albeit, a bit of a cheat but will save a lot of time. The idea behind the short cut is to get you on the right road to whatever skin tone you are looking for.

Before we go any further, you need to look again at that link you provided, the image with the coffee beans around the nick. You need to reconstruct the major editing elements in the picture; the golden/orange tone is not the only element in the pictures. Other elements contribute to the overall outcome.

Here is a breakdown of the various elements:

1- The retoucher started off with a finished product, meaning, he or she applied the effect to a portrait that is already edited to his or her satisfaction, you can’t start this effect unless you are ready to publish your image.

2- Once the effect was applied, a good amount of D&B was applied, without D&B, you would not get the full potential of the effect.

3- Then, some sort of “faint” glow was applied to the upper part of the face that covers the forehead, eyes, nose and upper parts of the cheeks.

4- Finally, some amount of vignette was applied to the picture
All those elements go together; you really can’t omit one of them.

I have attached two pictures, a before (it is a finished product that was released to the client and actually won an award , I can't emphasize enough how important it is to start with an image that is edited and ready to go.

Then, there is the after image, even though it has the effect in it, I did a very quick, lousy and horrible job on the D&B part, I did not want to spend forever on the D&B.

Here are the steps (the short cut), if you think it is long, you don’t want to see the non-shortcut method, lol.

1- Start off with either a new finished picture or stamp your edit layers to create a stamp on the top of your layer stack.

2- Duplicate this layer (stamp) or the new image to new document, call it “target document or image)

3- Change the color mode of the Target image to LAP color space

4- Go to www.ekolesnik.com , find that picture you are interested in (coffee beans), save copy on your PC or MAC, find a way to get copy of the picture. We will call this picture “Source image)

5- Back to photoshop, we have Target image open, we need to open Source image too. Now, we have three documents open, the original one, the Target (it was the stamped layer in the Original and the third one is the Source image

6- Select the source image; change its color mode to LAP color space.

7- Pick the color sampler (or is it picker?) tool, set it to 5X5 pixels, pick an area in the picture that you think you may have a corresponding location on the Target image, in my case, I picked the area between the eyebrows and slightly above, just a bit above.

8- Look at the info box, you should see Point 1 it will have 3 values, one for L (luminosity) one for A channel and the third value for B channel, write them down, don’t leave them in the info box, just right them down, I think, my values where L67 A23 B34 I could be wrong, I don’t remember.

9- We are done with the Source image, leave it on the screen as reference or keep it in your browser, we don’t need it any more, we got what we need from it.

10- Back to the Target image, we will do some work there, the idea of what we are about to do is to match the skin color of the Target to the Source, it will NOT be exact match, but, somehow close, it will just put us on the road. It really depends on your picture, is it lighter, darker, whatever.

11- We are still in LAP mode on the Target, pick the color sampler tool, drop point at the exact location of your portrait, between eh eyes, if you can (our Target sample point location should match the location of the Source sample point, if we can – you may use some other location just make sure it is sort of neutral, not too dark or too light) – Keep the info box open, we need to see the values of the sample point all the time!

12- open a Levels adjustment layer on the top of the Target

13- From the drop down list of the Levels, select A channel, move the white triangle on the bottom right of Levels (also known as the white point) to the left (you might want to move the black point to the right – the dark point) keep moving the white point or the black one till the value of A channel in the info box match exactly the value of the A channel of the source, you wrote the values down. Sometime, you might not be able to get the exact value, like, if you want 67, you might be able to get 66 or 68 but not 67, pick either value.

14- Time to do the same for the B channel, select B channel from the drop down list on Levels, play with the white and black points till the value of the B channel in the info box (the sampled point) match the value of the B channel of the Source image.

15- Back to the drop down list, select L channel, this time, leave the white and black points alone, instead, select the Neutral point, the middle point on the Levels graph. Move this point left or right till the value of the L channel in the info box match that of the L value of the source.

16- By now, you should have something that is sort of close or at least looks like it could put you on the right road.

17- While the Target image is selected, merge all the layers (two of them), you should have only one layer, now, change to color mode back to RGB.

18- Go back to your very original document, select the top layer, leave it alone, go to the Target image, select the top (and only) layer, drag it to the original image while holding the “Shift” key, let go, now, you should have a new layer on the top of the original file

19- Discard all open files, except for the original file

20- If you hide that new layer, you should see your original work in its original color, when you unhide the top layer; you should see everything in the same place, except, in the new color tone. The idea behind holding the Shift key is to keep the Alignment of the layers.

21- We are not there yet! – This was the easy part, the shortcut part!

22- Depending on the tone of the original image, you would end up with might look like some sort of color cast, it is not, it just that some color is more dominant than others, in my case, the image I attached, it was red, her skin was reddish. We will take care of this in the next step.

23- Create a Hue Saturation adjustment layer on the top of the current layer, the layer we dragged back to the original image. Clip this HSL adjustment to the layer on the top, we don’t want to affect the layers below.

24- Let us assume you got too much red in the skin, go to the drop down list on the HSL adjustment, select RED, you would want to desaturate the red a bit, just enough to get rid of it (or whatever color cast you got), some color casts might require desaturating two colors.

25- Depending on the source image, you might create a curves adjustment layer on the top of the HSL, don’t forget to clip it to the HSL layer, pull on the curve tiny bit to darken the image (or lighten it up, then you would push the curve up).

26- Once satisfied with the result, create an empty layer on the top of the curves, do not clip it, fill with 50% gray, select the Doge & Burn tools, set mode on both of them to MidTones, set strength to like 12%

27- Perform D&B on the face and upper shoulders, this is very important step otherwise you will not achieve the desired outcome

28- On the top of the D&B layer, create a stamp of all the layers, Alt+Ctrl (command for Mac)+shift+E

29- Select the stamped layer, go to image, adjust, Shadow Highlight, it will look bad, you will need to adjust the sliders, for my picture, I used 35% 25% 30% for Shadows, 0% 25% 30% for highlights – under adjustments, I used value of 15 for Midtone contrast, your picture will require different values!

30- Create a new layer on the top, apply some sort of glow to the face, subtle glow, you can see in my picture and the one in the link you provided that the forehead, nose bridge and upper cheeks all have some sort of glow, it draws the eyes to this area.

31- Create another stamp on the top, go to Filter > lens correction > custom > vignette

32- Apply as much as you desire.

33- DONE!

Oh, forgot to mention, you would need to mask out the eyes, but not 100%, I masked the eyes 100%, I forgot to set the brush opacity to just 50%, we need the eyes to be neither 100% white nor 100%orange, somewhere in between.

As I mentioned before, I did not do good job with D&B part of the edit, too much work, but, you get the point.

Also, I left the global adjustment behind, since it really affects the back ground, this, you can do on your own, however, ask if you need help.

One more thing, since you have my work, just drag my image to your desktop and use it as source to read the color values. No need to go to the link I provided you.

Yes! This was the short cut

Let me know if I confused you…

[Produktak]

Re: How to get this look

Hello Aladin,

many many thanks for your time and willingness. I understand that way you describe is only "shorcut" but it is what I would like to read here :-) Your detailed list of works is great bonus.I will check it asap and I will let you know result :-)

[Aladdin]

Re: How to get this look

Just to clarify, what I mentioned above is the manual version of Photoshop "color Match', you will find it under Image\adjustment\color match, problem is, the photoshop version is not true color match since it also affects luminosity, it also applies the color match globally, however, the manual method targets a specific tone as a starting point.