Week 2 Example 4 Wreath

[kessi]

I found this excercise quite difficult. I don't understand the concept of the GRC with the various blacks.
In my first image I used Maximum black and reduced the shadow and with the magenta tried to bring out the characters.

[kessi]

With this image I set the GRC to medium black and just worked on the magenta to bring up the Chinese characters.

[ggroess]

You did great with the Max Black...The Medium version is again too Green. 

This is becoming a theme here...I'm going to attach a file with a good neutral Source.  Set a neutral on the attached image and re-post. 
Let's see if you have something weird going on....

Greg

[kessi]

Hi Greg,
I've set the neutral as you can see in the screen shot. Gee, I hope this works out.

kessi

[kessi]

Did I do this correctly? I do see a green cast on the image after I set the neutral on the third gray square from the left.
Now what. Recalibrate my monitor, I suppose.

kessi

[ggroess]

This is by no means scientific but you are correct in that you might want to re-cal your monitor.  It looks to me...again just from what I am seeing and this is a really poor way of looking at it.....

Check your Red settings first.  I had to make changes to the red channel to get the high lights and some of the 1/4 tones to look "normal" on my monitor.  I do not have a quantitative value for you but you should take a good look at the reds....

Greg

[kessi]

My next attempt with the medium black version of the wreath. I see that my yellow flowers have lost a bit of definition. I used the Hue clock to stay out of the green cast.
kessi

[ggroess]

Sorry about the delay...It has been a busy week...no excuses just information....

Ok...It is still slightly green but this time I am thinking you may have created your own issues...I took you image and used the curves as shown.  The darkest shadows have a green cast you should take out some of the Cyan and Some of the yellow to make them more neutral. There are a lot of points on the Magenta curve you posted...can you tell me more about what you were trying to accomplish overall. 

The other issue is overall contrast.  Try to bring more contrast into the correction.  Remember that Black makes the shadows more solid and it also adds contrast overall.  With this color space you have to think "ink on the paper" rather than color in the print.

Greg