Denim Trio

[Shadow]

Hi gang. Here's a new one. Found a couple of points for the middle gray ... settled on the man's hair near the hairline and then added a Curves Layer and set W/B at 244/15. This is still in it's early stages. Surprised by the amount of green cast. Tried couple ways to reduce it and finally went with Hue/Sat. Also went for Hue/Sat to deal with the blue cast. Lots more healing to do and the lady needs her arm back on the left. How does the color look to you? Seems a bit "cold" to me? Any thoughts? Thx gang.

[Shadow]

Current WIP. Stole some of the man's shirt to fashion the ladie's arm. The proportions on the arm are off to me ... ideas or suggestions? Thx

[Lynnya]

good morning my friend! Looking good so far.. I think you are right about the arm.. to me... it needs to be fatter and the upper arm is too long.. elbow should be higher..Color looks good.. I did copy it and messed with "color balance" increased the yellow a tad and then the red a tad.. with the arm.. you could jump it then free transform(rotate) so it bends at more of a right angle to the hand, moving it up some. Make it a smart object first so you can mess with it without damage.
Apart from that I think it looks great. :up:

[Shadow]

Happy Sunday to you Lynn. It's raining here. Working on a restore, my boy wonder is in my lap, life is good  :halo:
Thank you for the "good eyes"! Poor girl, that arm looked like something from a Monty Python skit  ;D
How is this looking? Didn't follow your feedback about the color ... do you mean for the bkgd? Thanks heaps!

[Lynnya]

much better  :up: color looks good... no I meant I just warmed the whole thing with color balance a tad but yours is fine.. I just wondered if maybe there was a little too much cyan in it.. I'm not sure tho, could be my monitor... :up: :up:

[Shadow]

I don't think it's just your monitor. It looked "cold" to me after the color correction. Will play with that some more. Thank you  :loveit:

[Lynnya]

I got a "cold" when I did the regular levels, curves etc as well.. that's when I took it into "color balance" and tweaked it a bit... (following Hannie's lead   :cool:)

[Mhayes]

Hi Shadow, good repair, but your color correction could have been done differently and much easier. Sometimes less is more, and the more you have to tweak something, the more apt it is to be a tad off. Here is doing a simple auto cures.



Next starting fresh with a Levels Adjustment where each of the 3 channels had the sliders brought in.



Last was trying to find neutral gray by adding a new layer set to soft light with the 50% gray checked; the layer's mode changed to "Difference." The result was not great and almost hazy, so I added an Auto Curves adjustment layer on top.  I'm not wild about this last one, because it basically is trying to correct my choice on the neutral gray. To me this photo does not have a good neutral gray other than the man's watch band or face of watch.



A simple Levels Adjustment of the channels or the  auto Curves Adjustment would have been the better choice and would have keep the skin tones good. You were able to notice the cooling effect and the increased blueness of the denim. It's not that you did a bad restore, but you were forced to doing extra tweaking because your color correction was off from the start.

You did a great job of showing your work flow and also great repair of damaged parts.

Margie

[Lynnya]

Wow Margie good tips for me too!!!  I always used to do auto curves why did I stop? Thanks for this...

[Shadow]

[Mhayes]

Shadow, yes, much better!  :up:

Margie

[Lynnya]

Shadow it's much better... can you soften the edges a bit.. it looks a bit "cut out"... great job
:up:

[Shadow]

Thanks Margie and Lynn! Does this look better?  ::)

[Bambi]

I try not to remove or replace the background. But when I have to, I select the background, contract the selection by 20-30 pixels, feather, then delete or fill. That saves the transition area between the subject and background. Then you can repair the damage in that transition area without it looking cut out.

[Mhayes]

Shadow, the version before this may have been a little rosy but now their faces look pasty. Maybe somewhere in between?

Margie