Conga line

[sjordan93436]

At 25,600 iso.  I have excuses.  I had only my landscape lens and no flash.  Result...  some noise, some color cast. 

Then my attempt.  My first try was very hurried and I just did a quick b&w conversion.  I had to mask the color correction. 

The blue channel is still ugly. ?

[mikemeister_admin]

This is a great photo, but oh how hard to do anything with.

I'm not at all pleased with my attempt and it makes me feel I need to go on a course!

My steps were...
1 NeatImage to remove the noise - that was the only easy step!
2 Take a copy, convert to Lab and apply Jacob's Ladder, using the A channel as the controller, to get the colours roughly right for the girl and her dress
3 bring that back to rgb and layer in colour mode over the NeatImage layer
4 apply a luminosity curve to darken the jackets and bottom left area (masked out the eyes) - only way I could think of to kill the blue problem.
5 CM to refine the tone and colour in Lab - never done such a strange curve before.  It would probably have been better in rgb, but I'm getting lazy about using that colour space
6 finally applied a very slight rgb curve in PS to add some shape to the face which had gone a little flat.

Great challenge - thank you.
Zog

[ggroess]

Devilish little image...
I'll take a swing at this soon...

Greg

[sjordan93436]

Yep.  Noise, color, "raccoon eyes".  When I opened it in Portrait Professional, wow the noise is jarring.

It is a conga line, note the extra hands on the hips.

[ggroess]

Steve,
After taking multiple swings at this I find that the best solution I can come up with is somewhere between your image and Zogs. 
I like the color in Zog's image and the detail preservation in yours.  The noise does not bother me all that much and some of it can be removed with some masking.
If you download his image and make it a layer on yours set to color you will see what I mean. 

I think that your image has great detail and tonality but Zog's color is where you want to be. 
Just my 2 cents worth..

Tough challenge...
Greg

[Niels Rasmussen]

Hi all. This is my take. I tend to take lots of little bites when curving; make a change here, save then make another pass etc. In so doing, I easily lose track of all the individual steps involved. Suffice to say, after some initial noodling in Topaz denoise, most of the work was done in the darker tones and that involved extensive use of the inverted K mask. I didn't want to (and in fact couldn't) remove the warmth from the image, preferring instead to keep a little of the tungsten cast. Regards, Niels Rasmussen

[ggroess]

Couldn't...We can help...Didn't want to...you certainly are free to choose...

I downloaded your image and applied the RGB curve shown...It's not perfect but it is better...the majority of the curve points are to hold the adjustment into the middle tones...Leaving the shadows and highlights alone helps with this image...

I have attached the ACV file so you can load the curve in Curvemeister...save the file to your desktop, open your image in CM and click the load button...

Greg