next »

Total Members: 1578
New This Month: 7
New This Week: 1
New Today: 1

A touch of Frost

16th Birthday Before and After

Great Family Smiles!

Mother and child

[DavieBoyDave]

Was an easier one - and changed my fav colour from green to red!!! 

Ready to send back home?

Dave.

[glennab]

Hi Dave

Another awesome job!  For heaven's sake, save a few for the rest of us.  By the time I've rebuilt my baby's ear and mouth, you'll have the galleries cleaned out!

The only thing I question is the light area on our left above the picture.  My tendency would be to make the wall a consistent color, since I can't see anything that would cause the anomaly.

Cheers!

GK

[Hannie]

Hi Dave,

I have one pick on an otherwise beautiful restoration.  I don't know exactly what it is but to me it seems that the shadows seem a little too harsh.  The lady's hair, the painting on the wall for instance lost some detail?  Do you use curves for the levels adjustment?(
Below is a rough levels correction of the original and there you might be able to see what I mean.  (My version is a little on the light side and still needs some adjustment.)

Hannie

[Mhayes]

Hi Dave, looks like the red is as lovely as the green.  You have done a good job on your restore but I agree with Hannie that it looks like you have done it from the master Curves Adjustment for all the channels? I played around with this one and the normal way of finding the neutral gray, black, and white in Curves didn't prove that successful.

I decided that since I wanted to tone down the red to go to Lab in the beginning. Go to Image>Mode>Lab. Go over to your layers and click on the channel's tab. In Lab you will see a lightness channel, click on it. Once it pulls up the black and white, go up to Image"Adjustment?Shadow/Highlights. Pull the slider to the left to around 20% on the shadows and hit OK.



While still in Lab's channel click on lab above the lightness channel and then hit Crl M (PC) to bring up the Curves box. (On my example I have the darkness and lightness arrows reversed from what is the default.) Look at the pull down menu and pick channel a, which is the one that holds the red and green colors. Sometimes I will click on the photo to see where I need to add a point and if I need to pull the curve away from that color. This time I clipped some of the red by moving the line up. After you finish, click OK. Go back up to Image>Mode> and change back to rgb.



I still wasn't happy with the amount of red, so I created an Adjustment Curves Layer and went to the pull down box and chose red. I did that rather than using the master, which would have caused problems with the other colors. I tweaked it where I liked it and then hit OK.



Here is the final, which still needs work, but I am happy with the skin color and also the color of the man's suit. The curtains need work, but for that I would work on a separate layer.



Thanks for the incredible amount of restorations you are doing. We enjoy seeing your WIP.

Margie

[Hannie]

Margie, thanks for the tut on curves.  I didn't realize I could use the individual colors adjustment there too.

Great tip!

Hannie

[DavieBoyDave]

All comments taken on board and included - Thank you everyone.

Ready to be flown back home?



Side by side - left to right - Before and before.... before and after! (I just wanted to see them side by side)

[Mhayes]

Wow David, big improvement!! 

Margie

[Hannie]

Dave, that is an improvement.  I don't know if you have more work to do one this one but if you don't I would suggest another curves adjustment layer to brighten it up a little?

Hannie

[DavieBoyDave]

Stupid colour management - I have just realised, after 3 hours of testing and playing about, that the color manager I was using in CS3 was for my old monitor... So everytime I saved it, it was applying colour casts and darkness to the whole photo...

So... all my edits look fine in CS3 and then dark once uploaded, or greeny, or bluey.

Hopefully I have fixed it - does this look any better? Brighter, more true... etc?

 

[DavieBoyDave]

It still looks blue-ish... not so dark - but blue..  in the browser (IE - and what you see), Irfanview and MS Paint.
But in Windows Photo Gallery (default for Jpegs in Vista I think) and CS3 they look perfect.

Hopefully you can see the difference here - all the same pic in 5 different apps - all labelled.

The ones on the right are more blue - aren't they??? Any ideas? I know it is colour management - but what?

Something I need to post somewhere else?

[glennab]

Dave, I don't know anything about the software you mentioned other than Photoshop, but I do know that it has powerful color management capabilities.  I certainly agree that the version from CS3 looks spot on.  There are so many variables in preferences in the different software that it's plain confusing!  I have several books on color management and color correction, and I still get baffled at times.  If your setting for viewing on screen is sRGB, you should get a fairly true representation.  For printing, Adobe RGB is what I've seen recommended most.

For what it's worth…

GK

[Hannie]

Hi Dave,

What a difference all these applications show in colors, very confusing! 
I agree with Glenna that CS3 looks the best, a little too yellow on my monitor but a lot better than the others. 
The improvement in detail retention when you compare it with the very first version that you posted is great.  (Once detail is lost it is almost impossible to get back afterwards, a little color balancing later on is always possible.)

Hannie