All right we’re going to look at this image and get rid on some of the reflections in the decorative Christmas balls. One thing I want to talk about first of all is the fact that the image to me appears to be very cold almost on the green side. That appears to be a color cast so my first guess would be that there was either set on automatic white balance on the camera which is a bad idea for in the studio especially when you’re using strobes and flashes. You really want to use a custom white balance or create a custom white balance in the studio especially if you’re using the same white and it’s a very controlled situation as most studio situations are.
So you want to capture an image that’s very neutral or near to neutral and or the preset was set wrong or something went wrong with this image. Because you don’t want to have to go in and try and fix the image every time you get a photograph, and we can kind of have an idea by going to the window info palette here and setting the picker at 3x3 average, it’ll give this a vague idea. And if I just go in this area here which is kind of a light gray, it’s a white blanket but it’s like gray in reality. And if I look at my info, I could see there’s a lot of green. You notice the RGB? It’s right here. There’s a lot of green like 222 green, 196 red and 201 in the blue. So we’ve got a lot of green in this image. The second number is blue, so the lowest number is red. So it’s very much on the cold side leaning very heavily towards the green.
So, that tells me that. So you really want to have a look at that and it shouldn’t be an issue. You shouldn’t have to verify your colors unless you’re testing and you’re working through these issues. But once you get it to established, you don’t want to have to go to corrective measures. Avoid corrective measures. You should get a good custom white balance or good white balance and good exposure.
So, we’re going to have to fix that first, at least, that’s my suggestion. So let’s go to adjustments, curves and I often if I have a problem image and try to use the curves gray point if there’s a neutral gray area in the image. This appears to be a grayish kind of carpet. Let’s try it. There it warmed it up. Let’s click OK. Let’s go back to our info and let’s see if there’s difference. Where I look there’s a red ones up, the greens are still very high and let’s compare the two. There it is before, and there is hit jump up watch the numbers. There is the original. You can tell just by looking at it and there is the after.
So, it’s not perfectly balance, but you know its close and again you don’t want to get into trying to make it perfect because it’s got that problem going with it. But the thing that we can do just like in my regular work flows, we’ll go to selective color, decrease the Cyan in the red channel by adding more red or this will increase reds in the skin tones as well. So in this case, I'm going quite high and it looks very good. You don’t want to over do this. You’re better less than you are and we’ll start with this. I mean this looks a lot better so we’re going to go at that and stick with that.
Now regular workflow I'm just going to run through at all. First step 20, 60, 0, in the unshaped mask which is under filter and as you all know, this is the D fog step, it’s not a sharpening step. It just boosts to contrast up a little bit and increases the things that fogging this away, it increases the clarity of the image.
So, I've already kind to neutralize a little bit. I've increased the reds by decreasing the Cyans in the red channel and in the D fog and we might go into hue saturation and just a little bit punch up the colors a little bit more, not a whole lot. And let’s stick with that.
And now, we’re going to go into retouch. Now, with children, I generally don’t remove a lot of the under the eyes because they’re natural in creases but we can take it down just a little bit. If you take it down too much, it’s not a look right so just a little, little wave that these boys are smiling away, having a great time looking like Santa Claus. We’re going to retouch the eyes a little bit just break them up, I’m just doing this a habit and we’re going to lighten that up with dodging. Actually I don’t know if I’ve mention that dodge tool. I'm that at the very high exposure.
Generally, I work in the 20s, dodge the eyes. You can go into the increase the exposure and going to the eye and really intensify that dodge and create some fake speculars. And they actually look pretty good. You
just don’t want to over do it. So we’re going to add a little more brightness to the eyes. That is up to you how much and how little you want to do that. So you know, I said dodges is said to be a little bit sparkle to the eye.
Alright, let’s get rid of the reflection the in the crystals balls and while I'm going to do this. This is by using the clone stamp and then I'm going to go to lighten and I'm going to go pretty high. Let’s try 74. We’ve got everything showing up in the background there, and we’re going to go in and just lighten all those areas. And when I'm done lighting this, using the clone stamp I’m going to go in and blur it all using the Gaussian blur to history brush just to smooth it out because I’ll never get this absolutely perfect nor do I want it to be absolutely perfect because other reflections, reflections are reply by nature any ways there is. I'm going to normal now; there is a countertop thing in there. I’ll just keep it to normal, might speed things along and just go in there and smooth that over a little bit more. I don’t know about this. I kinda don’t mind that it’s kind of a Christmas ready thing to it so it’s not bad. There’s a big shiny reflection from the umbrella and that’s okay too.
So let’s go into this area here, and do the same thing. Lighten, basically, it just light, you see I'm selecting this area and I'm going over to the darker area and I'm saying whatever pixels are lighter or darker, I want you to lighten by a 74 percentage opacity and sometimes you want to go much lower of piece. So if you just want to be very subtle about it. I'm not a very subtle guy most of the times, so I'm going to go at 74. And we got the carpet in there still.
Now, you know, if this is an issue, you can crop that out or you can go in and rebuild all this area here or you can try and dodge it out. But of course obviously what you want to do is you want to avoid that by setting your props up while you’re shooting. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to see what this gives. I'm dodging right now, I'm at shadows range here, and I'm just going to I could use the paint brush if I want it too. I'm just going to kill that great carpet. It looks nice and actually, kind of misty so that’s kinda cool. And you can finesse that a little bit, so that’s one way to get rid of the gray carpet. I'm just going to make this up as I’m going along here. Gaussian blur, so we’re going to blur the image more, more, more, lots and lots of blur there we go.
So I'm blurring the image and I'm going to go back in the history brush state, put the history brush on the Gaussian blur state and there’s my brush there and then I'm going to select it and I'm going to go a very strong blur and then increase my brush size. I’ll just go in and then blur that a little bit s it looks like a little smoother. If you want it too, you could go in there, and just simply blur out everything and I’ll make it up until it’s perfect. But again, why would you want it to?
There we go, I mean, what more can you do. I would probably be tempted to go right here and lighten that just maybe not as high opacity, but that line right across here. Let’s just reduce that a little bit more right in there using the clone stamp and go back to history brush and just kind to blur it all in there, simple tools you know just to create this sometimes these are the solutions.
So that’s it, that’s basically the amount of time I would spend on that image, to try and fix it. Again I would remind you to get a good white balance, so that you don’t have to go in there and do corrective measures, so that your skin tones are enhanced because you’re not corrected. They don’t need re-correcting. So as you know we always hammer up point home that a god image starts with good exposure, good white balance, and a good image always starts there so that you don’t actually have to correct it, you get to enhance it a little bit more. So I hope you enjoyed it.
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