The deep end of the pond...

[ggroess]

While certainly not a frog... this will spin your gears for a while....

BTW the class is way easier than this....
Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Well,at least it reads like skin even if it doesn't look like skin.GregM

[ggroess]

you got to love those hue clocks...

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

This is a fantastic image to try and correct, but I think it needs a professional retoucher to do it justice.  Why?

Well the colours interactive with each other so that when you correct for skin tones, it just does not look correct.

I found this out in my project and here are two images to show you what I mean...

The sky is the interesting area, nice bit of yellow sun and then a strange band of pink before a green tint surrounding.

In the 2nd image I've added a pink blob in the sky because that pink band surrounding the yellow is not pink at all - just look at the hue clocks.
Pink has to have the channels in the order red, blue and green, and thus at hues to the left of 360 degrees.

But that pink band is at 40 degrees, and then the next green band at 60 degrees (pure yellow!) and finally we get to the blue-ish cloud, which is green-cyan!

What on earth is going on?

'Tis our adaptable eyes, making up colours that do not exist !

I post my feeble attempt at in the next posting.

[mikemeister_admin]

I attach a screen shot of my attempt showing the layers (except the first 2 which were NeatImage and FocusMagic - a whole 4 pixels were needed to put it into focus - I then flattened).

In the background of this snapshot, I show a 'normal' face photo - note that the hues are almost the same, but the faces looks completely different.

First I curved to remove the skin colour cast (in PS, not CM!), then I added a curve to lighten just the nose (39% opacity).
The forehead looked blown, so I run a standard Dan M action for Blown Highlights at 59% opacity.
Then I went into CM to set the basic tones and contrast.
The lace was a bit blue-green, so I curved that out having pinned the bottom end of the curve.
I then played with a touch of contrast to tweak it
Finally I applied the Green over the Red channel (which is pretty horrible), from the original image, and placed that in Lumninosity mode at 73% (that layer is not shown in the snapshot).

I've included the main curves (if I have remembered correctly!) and each layer as 8 wee images (low quality), before my final rendition.

Most interesting image, I really enjoyed that - thank for re-awakening my brain Greg!
Chris

[mikemeister_admin]

Cant leave her alone - here is a more cheating version

I just applied the skin tones from the background image (in the snapshot) over the 4th layer of the previous attempt in the Blown highlight action and then re-toned it in CM rgb - giving a bit of an overdone effect, but you get the idea (I hope).  What I really like about this action (in which you duplicate the image & convert to Lab, then crudely paint a colour on a new layer & set the blend to Color & then copy it back to the rgb image) is that you do not have to be accurate.

Oh - and why did I originally curve in PS and not CM when correcting for colour in my first attempt?  The reason is that I wanted another image to compare against, but with CM I can not show another image and use the hue clocks on both of them.  In PS one can easily do that - sorry CM!

Must stop playing

[ggroess]

This can be done in CM with 2 passes through the software.  The first is RGB this is where the major work occurs.  Each channel needs to have it's thresholds set separately.  Then some spot tweaking to keep the skin tones reasonable.

The second pass is LAB for tone adjustments without messing up the color and a saturation boost.
The rest of the re-touching can be done as needed but the color save is the biggest gain here...

I hope you find this a reasonable recovery...

ACV files attached.

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Chris,Beth4.jpg verynice.GregM

[Chris Nicola]

This is a very difficult one as the colours do not seem to have faded equally across the entire range of shadows, midrange and higlights. I decided to use just CM for the exercise and go by visual judgement. Further retouching could be done in PSE. On my screen it still has a Kodak Eastman brownish tint. Its not perfect but an improvement and I had great fun trying!

Kind Regards

Chris Nicola

[mikemeister_admin]

Second try.Lots of layers in RGB.GregM