Topic: Little Boy Mad (Work Flow)

[ganna]

First played with some of the toys in Camera Raw 5.3. Desaturated the lips and boosted the light down, next to the head.  Then with the colour cast in CM. I'm sure you like the new eye colour better

[Greg Groess]

Hey Ganna,

Grey eyes??  hmmm, add that to the zombie image from before....
try a softer brush on the lips..they look kinda cut out...

Greg

[Greg Groess]

2) Color Cast on the image (Eyes)

Ok..Here we go...

1) open the image in CM and click on the Mask Icon.  Select the A channel from lab as the mask,  (Shot 1) and crank on the contrast. when you invert the mask it will look like (Shot 2)

2) Invert the mask in CM by right clicking on the image and selecting invert mask from the menu.  Copy this mask using the copy mask icon and exit CM.

3) On a background copy layer add the mask and paint out anything except the eyes.

4) Re-select the image so you do not see the mask and open CM. You can try to kill this off in Cyan using CMYK but I found the eyes to look rather mottled and odd because of other colors in the eyes along with Cyan.  I choose Saturation in HSB. (shot 3) since it would kill off all colors in the areas that were not masked out. 

5) Hover the mouse over the eye in a few places and when you have a fairly long worm showing on the S curve, right click and select "contrast pin"  this will mark the two ends of the worm and link them together so you can move them as a unit.  Using the mouse hover over one end point until the 4 way arrow shows for the cursor.  Left click and drag the S curve up as shown in shot 3. Adjust until you are satisfied with the eyes.

6) can anyone suggest the next mask for the Lips??

3) Lips too red

4) Background Lighting mis-match

any more to add??

Greg

[Manda]

Took me a long time to get into using CM again.  I also found the whites of the eyes the most difficult.

I completely followed the posted workflow in LAB, but used my own curves towards the end (forgot to grab a screen print of the RGB curves).

thanks Mandy

EDIT: I hadn't seen the workflow directly above, otherwise I'd've tried Greg's new approach.

[Greg Groess]

3) Lips too red

1) Flattened the image from the previous step so I do not make any changes to the existing image.

2) create a new background copy layer and open CM on that layer.  I selected the A mask again for the lips since they were well defined and contrasted to the image.  You could chose another channel if you like. shot.jpg

3) Adjusted the mask channel in CM to high contrast as shown in Shot1. Copied the mask using the copy command and canceled out of CM.  Pasted the copied channel into a layer mask created on the background copy layer and pianted out the background noise and other items that I wanted to protect. Leaving the mask in shot2.

4) Selected the image part of the layer and opened CM to adjust the color in the lips.  I used the same strategy as the eyes and desaturated the lips slightly in the S channel of HSB.  I started by finding the biggest "worm" on the curve by moving the mouse slowly around the lips while watching the S channel.  When I have a significant length, I right click and select "Contrast Pin".  I then place the mouse on one of the end points of that contrast pin marker and adjust the saturation for the lips until they look real but not too de-saturated.  shot3.

[ganna]

Greg, thanks for the explination. You are shaking the rust out of the old horses

[Greg Groess]

4) Background Lighting mis-match 
Part 2

1) Flatten <Again>  This could certainly be simpler but I wanted to break it down a bit so bear with me...

2) Create another background copy layer <I know we just flattened> open the layer copy in CM and select the mask channel, in this case I chose the b channel from LAB for the same reasons...the contrast difference between the majority of the face and the background means I should be able to pull a fairly solid mask out of the process. Shot1

3) Adjusted the mask in CM to make it high contrast..<again> , Set the mask blur to light in CM which blurs the edge slightly and makes the mask easier to hide. Shot2

4) Pasted the mask back into PS on the layer copy as a mask <same as before> I then painted out the white space in the face and added white to the top corners to complete the cutout. shot3

5) Rather than fight too hard for the background color I decided to try the "tungsten to daylight" curve from the library folder in CM. to get there, open the image in CM as before and press the load button.  Drill down to the library folder as shown in shot 4a.

6) Click on the Incandescent to Daylight-RGB.acv file and it will load to CM.  Press load. shot4

[Greg Groess]

And Finally.....

Here are the before and after....We could do more..we certainly could do less...
In the last steps not shown I did some mild clone stamping to remove some facial blemishes and added a light blur to take the edge off the skin a bit.

Still not sure I like that but it needed something....

Greg