Curvemeister Forum

Hi Greg  :)

I didn't really know what colour lemurs were supposed to be, so I did a Google image search before I began my by-the-numbers correction. Having satisfied myself that the dark stripes on the tail were supposed to be black, I set my shadow point. I set a highlight on one of the lemurs' forehead, and a neutral on the foremost lemur's nose. I tweaked these RGB curves slightly, but nothing complicated...

I tried the Lab saturation boost in two different ways - with the Lab b channel, and with the RGB B channel. Upon comparing my results, I decided that I preferred the B channel, and having made that choice I also decided that I didn't like my L curve, so I changed the layer blending mode to 'Color'.

To make the image more punchy I worked on the K channel (Medium GCR), and finished with a touch of sharpening.

If I were to change anything with this correction I would like to make the brighter fur more neutral, but nothing struck me as being an easy way to achieve this without messing up everything else. I guess that I could mask it, but I would prefer to be able to do it with a curve... Any suggestions?

Cheers,
Lee.

Lee,
The idea is to use the one of the LAB channels as the mask so you can make the image more colorful without blowing the eyes out.  The Lemurs are gray on the forehead.  Just be careful where you set the neutral so you do not select some of the brown hairs....

With the mask you can make the grass and the rest of the Lemurs look very nice with sufficient color variation to make them really interesting.  The give away for overdoing this is the grass strands on the ground...

Greg