Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

[jsegalphoto]

This is my first post here on the forum but I'd like to say thank you to all the community members in my journey thus far, the information you've all provided has helped me so much, thank you all very much!

A question and some advice would be much appreciated in regards to the following:

I am retouching a water-stained concrete driveway on an architectural shot and find myself doing this more and more these days. I manage to clean up most blemishes using burn and dodge, clone stamping and healing, compositing clean pieces over the affected area etc, but am asking if there is yet another technique one might use, as I describe below:

I'd like your advice on a way to retain texture while painting/colouring the concrete colour from underneath, thus eliminating the need to manually clone/heal every little tiny spec individually, while simultaneously evenly colouring/toning the concrete blocks to avoid a "painted-on" look - something akin to freq. separation with skin, only for concrete.

Freq. separation works for me when fixing smoother surfaces like drywall and smooth hardwood flooring, but not so well on concrete. It seems like the problem is that what appears to be tonality/colour stains and blemishes ends up becoming part of the texture layer, hence I'm unable to paint/colour those spots away.

I've included link to an image with annotations and one clean file to work on so please see that for a more clear understanding. I hope that makes sense and thank you again for everyones time.

Jeremy

IMAGES:

http://i68.tinypic.com/9vjwv6.jpg
http://i67.tinypic.com/ng26hw.jpg

[klev]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

If you have decent texture there in the first place and it's not too far off, you can use burn and dodge techniques. You'll have to grab other sections of concrete to deal with the water spots. They're too prominent. If color balance is just a bit off on small spots, try cloning with a color blending mode. Turn down clone tool opacity if necessary.

It's kind of tedious. When it comes to evening out concrete, use a burn/dodge layer that allows you to adjust color balance simultaneously. Brighter areas will have a different rgb color balance.

[jsegalphoto]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

Thanks Klev I'll give the cloning with a different mode and try, and the difference in RGB is a good point.

J

[klev]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

Thanks Klev I'll give the cloning with a different mode and try, and the difference in RGB is a good point.

J

You're welcome. If you get stuck I'll make some kind of example. I've dealt with the same problem.

[skoobey]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

Freq separation is the way to go. Just use a gradient map to color things at the end.

[german_raf]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

I'd like to say thank you to all the community members in my journey thus far, the information you've all provided has helped me so much, thank you all very much!

If I understood correctly, you can use a mixer brush to even out gray (FS) and d&b to lighten dark spots. Look at my example (psd) of how to solve the problem quickly. Maybe this will help?


http://yadi.sk/i/qdCVpbu9oGLqn

[jsegalphoto]

Re: Concrete Clean Up - Preserve Texture

If I understood correctly, you can use a mixer brush to even out gray (FS) and d&b to lighten dark spots. Look at my example (psd) of how to solve the problem quickly. Maybe this will help?

Holy moly I didn't get a notification about your reply to this thread and I'm so sorry for the very late reply. Thanks for the advice german_raf, could you repost that example PSD if possible? I'd love to see your approach to this retouch. Thanks in advance!

J