Ok, I'll throw another one in here for skin smoothing. First off, I don't do anything super fancy with PP work. I use Kevin Kubota's PS actions for a lot of my work and then adjust off of those for opacity on different layers etc. At only 100 dollars, they've been a lifesaver, and I'd recommend them to any serious pro wedding photographer. I'm pretty good at photoshop, but the actions save hours for me every week, and are generally far more complex than I'd be willing to go for each image individually.
For the following image I did a minor crop, and and clone stamp to get my finger out of the top corner where I was holding the veil. Slight curves adjustment to brighten the exposure, and then the Kubota action "Eyes and Teeth enhance." Basically, I paint in on an adjustment layer to desaturate the whites of the eyes, burn slightly on the pupils, eyebrows and eyelashes and adjust opacity of each layer to suit. After everything I did a BW conversion using the Kubota Chocolate Syrup conversion and bumping the curves for extra contrast.
For skin smoothing I use the "healing brush" tool of PS. First I set at 100% opacity and heal any big blemishes, acne etc. Then I select a really nice clean bit of skin with good color and set the tool off that by alt-clicking on that set. The skin above this bride's left eyebrow looked good for this image. Then I set the brush to a medium size at about 5-20% opacity and single click around the areas of skin I want until the area looks a lot cleaner. This tones down pores and helps eliminate hot spots. Avoid having too high an opacity and don't make plastic looking skin. Also do single clicking as opposed to painting with the healing brush. Take lots of snapshots from the history toolbar, as it can be easy to start repeating patterns on the skin with the healing brush. To avoid this I like to have 3-4 source areas for the brush that I can draw from while doing the smoothing. Here is my before/after photo from last weekend. Hope it helps.
Yes, I use the Kubota Artistic tools pack 1 and 2. 2 is the newer one is is perhaps more useful if you had to pick just one. Also important to note that almost all of his actions are a bit over the top on purpose and require an opacity adjustment on some created layers so the photo doesn't look too fake.
I suggest in the Articles column found on the HOME page of this site that Fred or the moderators make a Wedding post processing article whereby we can post a before and after photos with step by step instructions including screen shots.
Edited by davekone on Aug 15, 2006 at 12:55 PM GMT
When you use curves or levels to get tonal range or simply add punch do it on a layer and change its blending mode to Luminosity. You get the effect without changing or shifting color.
Edited by davekone on Aug 15, 2006 at 12:55 PM GMT
For me PS is something which the more I know about the less I use. Each to their own of course, but it's not a style I aspire to.
I like the modifications to the large bride - that's skillful and subtle. You wouldn't really know it'd been done unless it was pointed out to you. That would be my goal.
I wonder if some of the original shots couldn't use a bit more pre-processing time - better lighting for example may be more beneficial to the image than trying to fix problems using PS.
Selective color... when done to hands they look dead to me.
Colour balance on raw versus jpeg? Doing two colour-balance adjustments instead of one should be obviously unwise, but there's also a physical difference between the data in the two realms. One's linear and the other isn't. Try adjusting the colour balance on something which should be white in the two spaces and you'll see the difference. It's much easier to adjust in raw.
Personally I find the conversion from RGB to LAB and back to be too destructive to my images, even to a 16 bit TIFF image! This is my only problem with the Sepia actions in Fred's B&W set.
Run that process and then look at your levels and see the missing data for yourself.
str8shooter wrote:
Personally I find the conversion from RGB to LAB and back to be too destructive to my images, even to a 16 bit TIFF image! This is my only problem with the Sepia actions in Fred's B&W set.
Run that process and then look at your levels and see the missing data for yourself.
Rather than look at the histogram, look at the image. I find very little difference when converting to lab and back and usually do this for sharpening.
I like the modifications to the large bride - that's skillful and subtle. You wouldn't really know it'd been done unless it was pointed out to you. That would be my goal
"I like the modifications to the large bride - that's skillful and subtle. You wouldn't really know it'd been done unless it was pointed out to you. That would be my goal.
Thanks, Phil."
I agree with this....sure would like to know how you did it. This has been a truly great post. I have learned a great deal from reading all the stuff from here. It would be good to have a post like this for every forum here (sports photography, ect.) You can learn so much more quickly from people who are out there every day doing this kind of stuff, rather than searching and maybe only finding mediocre material.
str8shooter wrote:
Personally I find the conversion from RGB to LAB and back to be too destructive to my images, even to a 16 bit TIFF image! This is my only problem with the Sepia actions in Fred's B&W set.
Run that process and then look at your levels and see the missing data for yourself.
I don't know about you, but my lab only accepts 8 bit JPEGs for printing. If yours is the same, I don't think that you will notice the data loss in the LAB conversion round trip at all.
tammyn53 wrote: "I like the modifications to the large bride - that's skillful and subtle. You wouldn't really know it'd been done unless it was pointed out to you. That would be my goal.
Thanks, Phil."
I agree with this....sure would like to know how you did it. This has been a truly great post. I have learned a great deal from reading all the stuff from here. It would be good to have a post like this for every forum here (sports photography, ect.) You can learn so much more quickly from people who are out there every day doing this kind of stuff, rather than searching and maybe only finding mediocre material.
Thanks, Tammy. Combination of liquefy tool, and dodging and burning to remove the lines and shadows that show where extra flesh is. In the one, an angled crop made a big difference. A lot of the time, a little bump of flesh will ruin a nice line, and just a touch of the liquefy tool will straighten it out. Sometimes you have to burn an area a little to make the shadows look right afterward.
