Kite flyers

[mikemeister_admin]

Shadow/highlight to open shadow detail. Lab and unsharp filter.

[ggroess]

Looks pretty good...can you kill off some of the blue in the shirts without messing up the skin tones??

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Quick shadow/highlight adj in PSE. Basic adjustments in CM. Seems to be a blue cast in picture. Increased light in faces with CM Lab. Applied. New adjustment in CM RGB mode and adjusted with skin and neutral pins in order to try get correct colors. Sky became bit dull.  
If using several pins RGB works better.
Thomas

[mikemeister_admin]

I can kill some of it with hue/sat adj layer. It affects sky, blue baseball hat and jeans. Don't know how to fix it with CM.

[ggroess]

Ok...I'll take that as not so much a statement as a question.

Here is one way you can "fix" this troubled image...
1. Open the image in LAB do a SHN adjustment to it to get the image into a better place.  I used a Lizard Tail correction on the shadow end of the L curve to open the faces without messing up the rest of the image too badly.

2. Switch to the B channel since the trouble is in the blue area of the image your first thought would be to adjust the blue.  The trouble is that when you do; you make more trouble than you want with the other areas of the image, and you almost have to solarize the blue to get the correction you are looking for. 

One of the strengths of LAB is the ability to move the "range" of the color around on the curve a bit. to accomplish this you can do the following. Place your mouse on a blue area of the shirts and note where the color worm is.  Move the mouse around until the color worm is about 1/2" long but still in the blue area of the shirts.

3) Right click on the spot and choose "contrast pin" from the fly out menu.  now you have two linked pins on the curve that you can move together.   Move the two points down to move the range of the B channel a bit.  then push the rest of the curve back where it belongs so the rest of the colors do not get too messed up.  (Shot2 ) Apply changes and exit CM.

4) Go back into CM in RGB mode and adjust the Blue channel as shown to bring the blue sky back a bit.  Close CM.  There is still some troouble with the blue but I hope you get the general idea.
This can also be done using a B Channel mask and not making it fully contrasted. (leaving some of the mask gray)

Play around a bit with this and think of other ways you can use this linked pins aspect of CM. 

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Thank you. I will try later and probably will have questions  ;D

[mikemeister_admin]

Thanks for info. Did not quite manage to do the same good work. The work with the lizard tail gave some artfacts in the faces which kept. See screenshot. When you adjusted b curve you used some kind of "inverted camel". Do not understand the two hills, I only got one.
Also include my final result but not satisfied with faces. Maybe they also have a yellow cast?
Thomas
PS I think in my previous try where I used PSE shadows/highlights quite a bit I got the faces to shine up better even than in your example? Did you also notice, comments?. DS

[ggroess]

The camel hump you describe was added by me to adjust some of the blue sky.  I did not like the color of the sky at that point and I made a small adjustment that I later added to in the Blue channel.

The lizard tail can be very tricky when it comes to skin tones.  It is easy to solarize the skin by creating a "flat" spot on the curve,(shot1) usually an area where the curve is horizontal or worse yet inverted.  Expand the L channel window to be over 2/3 of your screen and see if you can get a better result.  You sometimes have to push the curve pretty hard..

Greg