Little Boy Mad (Work Flow)

[mikemeister_admin]

If you apply the curves to a duplicate layer, you lose the ability to go back and tweak the curves later, unless you saved the ACV file. Using a Curves adjustment layer seems more flexible to me.

[ggroess]

Jayslu,
I thought about it... but I wanted to keep this kind of clean and simple...I do have to remember all of the experience levels in the class and try to not make this too much work...

I hope everyone understands that my work flow is mine and I am putting it out here to try to bring conversation out on this topic.  I really do welcome comment on the work flow and many past students are looking for more information on this topic.  The issues revolve aroud adding CM to your already established work flows and how people can or should change the work flow to make better use of the CM oplugin.

I feel that my humble PS and PSE skills are easily bested out here but in order to facilitate the conversation I am willing to take off the blinds so to speak and let you see my thought process and work flow.

The more comments the better! We will all benefit from this. 
This thread will be moved out to the greater forum as the class closes down next week.

Greg

[imported_ganna]

Greg, looking at the hue clock, what should the colour of the sclera (white of the eye) be? I see it leans over to cyan. How I wish I could get a list of the normal colours of all kind of things. I picked up a few over time, for instance  human skin colour (in the lunch hour) etc. Is such a list available? Please be our hero and drop some of these pearls in this forum ;)

[ggroess]

Sclera can be anything from Jaundice yellow to a light cyan.  I know form looking at many different eyes that yellow and red are bad colors we look tired or sick when they are in that range.  I am going to finish the work flow by tackling the eyes and lips...I also will revisit the background since as we get the skin back to the right colors the Tungsten color is intensified...

I should have seen that coming...

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Looking at my image ,I think that if you remove too much cyan you wind up with wax museum dummy eyes-china white.It also seems to affect the band of skin between the eye and the lashes.With the person a distance from the camera I guess you can use the eye as a hightlight or a white reference..GregM

[imported_ganna]

First played with some of the toys in Camera Raw 5.3. Desaturated the lips and boosted the light down, next to the head.  Then with the colour cast in CM. I'm sure you like the new eye colour better ;D

[ggroess]

Hey Ganna,

Grey eyes??  hmmm, add that to the zombie image from before....
try a softer brush on the lips..they look kinda cut out...

Greg

[ggroess]

2) Color Cast on the image (Eyes)

Ok..Here we go...

1) open the image in CM and click on the Mask Icon.  Select the A channel from lab as the mask,  (Shot 1) and crank on the contrast. when you invert the mask it will look like (Shot 2)

2) Invert the mask in CM by right clicking on the image and selecting invert mask from the menu.  Copy this mask using the copy mask icon and exit CM.

3) On a background copy layer add the mask and paint out anything except the eyes.

4) Re-select the image so you do not see the mask and open CM. You can try to kill this off in Cyan using CMYK but I found the eyes to look rather mottled and odd because of other colors in the eyes along with Cyan.  I choose Saturation in HSB. (shot 3) since it would kill off all colors in the areas that were not masked out. 

5) Hover the mouse over the eye in a few places and when you have a fairly long worm showing on the S curve, right click and select "contrast pin"  this will mark the two ends of the worm and link them together so you can move them as a unit.  Using the mouse hover over one end point until the 4 way arrow shows for the cursor.  Left click and drag the S curve up as shown in shot 3. Adjust until you are satisfied with the eyes.

6) can anyone suggest the next mask for the Lips??

3) Lips too red

4) Background Lighting mis-match

any more to add??

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Took me a long time to get into using CM again.  I also found the whites of the eyes the most difficult.

I completely followed the posted workflow in LAB, but used my own curves towards the end (forgot to grab a screen print of the RGB curves).

thanks Mandy

EDIT: I hadn't seen the workflow directly above, otherwise I'd've tried Greg's new approach.

[ggroess]

3) Lips too red

1) Flattened the image from the previous step so I do not make any changes to the existing image.

2) create a new background copy layer and open CM on that layer.  I selected the A mask again for the lips since they were well defined and contrasted to the image.  You could chose another channel if you like. shot.jpg

3) Adjusted the mask channel in CM to high contrast as shown in Shot1. Copied the mask using the copy command and canceled out of CM.  Pasted the copied channel into a layer mask created on the background copy layer and pianted out the background noise and other items that I wanted to protect. Leaving the mask in shot2.

4) Selected the image part of the layer and opened CM to adjust the color in the lips.  I used the same strategy as the eyes and desaturated the lips slightly in the S channel of HSB.  I started by finding the biggest "worm" on the curve by moving the mouse slowly around the lips while watching the S channel.  When I have a significant length, I right click and select "Contrast Pin".  I then place the mouse on one of the end points of that contrast pin marker and adjust the saturation for the lips until they look real but not too de-saturated.  shot3.