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Archive 2014 · Portrait Help???

  
 
jmcaverly
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Portrait Help???


I shot some senior photos for a friend of my son's and I need some help. I do not shoot senior portraits very often. The young man that I shot has very fair skin and he had very red looking skin in the warm weather. Any suggestions on how to town down the red to get more natural looking skin? I have tried desaturating the reds with a saturation layer, but the skin looks kind of flat and bland. I have attached a file that is straight out of the camera (re-sized for posting), for an example.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Jeff







May 03, 2014 at 10:20 PM
jrash168
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Portrait Help???


If you are using Photoshop, you can try this.
First create a blank layer
Use the color picker and click on the red area of the skin
Hit Alt+the "delete" key (your layer will fill with the color you picked, probably some kind of red)
Hit CTRL+i ( your layer is now probably a green since it is the opposite of red)
Change the blending mode to "color" (you should now see your image in a green tint)
Reduce opacity to around 10% (reduce to make more red, increase to make more green)

Hope this helps.



May 03, 2014 at 11:56 PM
VilleK
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Portrait Help???


One method:

1. Make a selective color adjustment layer
2. Select reds and remove some magenta (the value depends on the photo).
3. Use layer mask to apply the selective color layer to target area.

In addition I would increase the color temperature of this photo a bit before taking it to PS.



May 04, 2014 at 03:33 AM
Ian Boys
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Portrait Help???


Black and White


May 04, 2014 at 04:06 AM
gbdz
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Portrait Help???


I use Athentec a lot.


May 04, 2014 at 04:54 AM
Ian Boys
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Portrait Help???


Tried a version ..

Hue Sat - 40
Curves Red midtone down, blue shadows up, blue highlights down towards yellow
Photo filter 85 @ 25%
Curves RGB darks down for contrast
Softlight bottom half of eyes white 24%


Photoshop Edit NOT MY PHOTO by Ian_Boys, on Flickr



May 04, 2014 at 05:07 AM
jmcaverly
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Portrait Help???


jrash168 wrote:
If you are using Photoshop, you can try this.
First create a blank layer
Use the color picker and click on the red area of the skin
Hit Alt+the "delete" key (your layer will fill with the color you picked, probably some kind of red)
Hit CTRL+i ( your layer is now probably a green since it is the opposite of red)
Change the blending mode to "color" (you should now see your image in a green tint)
Reduce opacity to around 10% (reduce to make more red, increase to make more green)

Hope this helps.


Thanks for the suggestions. Here is a quick edit with your method above. Looks much better than the pink look that I was getting. I will keep working on these. Thanks for taking the time to comment. I appreciate it.








May 04, 2014 at 07:06 AM
jmcaverly
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Portrait Help???


Ian Boys wrote:
Black and White


Black and White was my first thought when I took these. Here is an exaggerated b&w with Topaz.








May 04, 2014 at 07:08 AM
Eyeball
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Portrait Help???


Here is my shot. You could warm or cool from here depending on your preference. I usually prefer on the warm side and your original was very cool IMO.

For me, the pink skin is less problematic than the blotchiness. The pink skin is part of who he is and if you try to make him an orangish tan, it won't look natural.

For the red blotchiness, the best tool is often the hue/saturation adjustment layer. Select "Reds" in the H/S panel and then use the color selection sliders to hone in on the red splotches. You can temporarily crank the Hue control to one side or another so you can clearly see the differentiation between blotchy and non-blotchy areas. Once you have homed in on the blotches, you can use a combination of hue, saturation, and lightness to practically make them disappear (often much easier than using the healing brush all over the place). The hue adjustment can make a big difference by itself. Remember, cyan neutralizes red and green neutralizes magenta.

Beyond that, I did some dodging and burning along with some global HIRALOAM sharpening to bring back facial structure and pop. Also, a little contrast boost to the eyes and some color balancing to different areas if I thought they needed it. I did a minor amount of healing to handle the few remaining blotches. I finished up with a vignette.

I hope that maybe gives you some ideas.

P.S. - I was trying to remember where I first learned the Hue/Sat technique and it finally came to me. It was Lee Varis's "Skin" book, which I would highly recommend for your post-processing library. Here is a link to a video he did of the technique:




http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12145446/baseball.jpg

Edited on May 04, 2014 at 08:25 AM · View previous versions



May 04, 2014 at 08:04 AM
Danpbphoto
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Portrait Help???


jmcaverly wrote:
Thanks for the suggestions. Here is a quick edit with your method above. Looks much better than the pink look that I was getting. I will keep working on these. Thanks for taking the time to comment. I appreciate it.



I think this looks very good and natural.
Dan



May 04, 2014 at 08:08 AM
michaelglenn
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Portrait Help???


For the color version, I tried to maintain the integrity of the freckles, as I find them to be very important on this subject. I went into color saturation and slightly desaturated the "reds" and "magenta" channels. Not by too much though, but just enough to get rid of the redness. Then I used the curves toolbar to adjust the Red, Green, and Blue color channels. With curves, I was able to tone the freckles in a way that looks more natural, but not punching with red. Here is the result:

http://dl.dropbox.com/s/9g603t1ctvcx623/baseballedit.jpg

I also made a BW version to pop out the freckles

http://dl.dropbox.com/s/x4avrimt9e5i51r/baseballedit%20BW.jpg




May 04, 2014 at 09:07 AM
sidefunk
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Portrait Help???


Just having some fun with this as well. Adjusted the curves, warmed up the white balance, pulled back red and magenta saturation, pulled up red luminance and applied some split toning. I like michaelglenn's version above which accentuates the freckles.







May 04, 2014 at 11:28 AM
jmcaverly
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Portrait Help???


sidefunk wrote:
Just having some fun with this as well. Adjusted the curves, warmed up the white balance, pulled back red and magenta saturation, pulled up red luminance and applied some split toning. I like michaelglenn's version above which accentuates the freckles.



Thanks for taking the time to post your version. I will get working on using all of this different suggestions.

Jeff



May 04, 2014 at 03:03 PM
jmcaverly
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Portrait Help???


michaelglenn wrote:
For the color version, I tried to maintain the integrity of the freckles, as I find them to be very important on this subject. I went into color saturation and slightly desaturated the "reds" and "magenta" channels. Not by too much though, but just enough to get rid of the redness. Then I used the curves toolbar to adjust the Red, Green, and Blue color channels. With curves, I was able to tone the freckles in a way that looks more natural, but not punching with red. Here is the result:

http://dl.dropbox.com/s/9g603t1ctvcx623/baseballedit.jpg

I also made a BW version to pop out the
...Show more

Thanks for your suggestions. I like both of the images that you posted.

Jeff



May 04, 2014 at 03:05 PM
Healey
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Portrait Help???


Hi New here, trying to upload my first image.

http://www.hahnemuhlecertifiedstudio.com/webimages/967711-h1.jpg

The young man is very handsome but the color balance was not very flattering. Too blue/green overall. Just fixing the color balance using the green and blue curves helped greatly. Most of the blotchiness was in the green channel so I channel blended some 30% green and 20% blue into the red channel and replaced the luminosity of the original layer with the new channel blended layer.

I created a merged layer then used highpass filter and then blurred the result, inverted this layer, blended this layer into the image with linear light mode, changed the opacity to 50% and black masked the entire layer. Brushed in the skin repair layer over the worst of the acne but left the freckles alone. Did some highpass/overlay sharpening to add a more natural texture back to the skin and added some pop to the eyes.

Yeah, too complex a description. I am trying to learn how to teach photoshop, I am a better do-er than teacher. Any help you experts can give me on expressing the post-processing steps is very welcome.

Ema



May 04, 2014 at 06:05 PM
jmcaverly
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Portrait Help???


Healey wrote:
Hi New here, trying to upload my first image.

http://www.hahnemuhlecertifiedstudio.com/webimages/967711-h1.jpg

The young man is very handsome but the color balance was not very flattering. Too blue/green overall. Just fixing the color balance using the green and blue curves helped greatly. Most of the blotchiness was in the green channel so I channel blended some 30% green and 20% blue into the red channel and replaced the luminosity of the original layer with the new channel blended layer.

I created a merged layer then used highpass filter and then blurred the result, inverted this layer, blended this layer into the image with linear light
...Show more

Thanks for your description. I will give t a try. I have quite a few images of this young man to process yet.

Jeff



May 04, 2014 at 06:54 PM





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