Curvemeister Forum

The shadow was the object(earpiece?)above the logo on flyer#1,highlight from shirt of baseballcap and neutral from faded jeans just above red on back of flyer#1's leg.I would like a little more navy to the blue of the baseball cap.Greg M

For now let's leave the cap alone...
We are going to cover "spot" color changes later in the course.

For the image though you might want to try the curve shown below to improve the lighting on the faces and arms.

Lastly I think the color is still a bit muted...bump the saturation a bit as well and see if you like it better.

Greg

I disagree with your Neutral point - surely all jeans are blue, even if faded a bit!

I can not find anything in this image that I think should be neutral and I think the (massive) blue cast is caused by the blue sky - one is tempted to take the shaded middle of his jumper, which I assume is white.  But if I do then the jeans go too green!

So if I take the lower shadow crease towards the bottom of this jumper as a neutral and bump a bit of saturation with this curve (this is from rtClick on the curves>Copy>Copy All Curves)
;Lightness:  (0,0) (13,17) (17,23) (23,28) (100,100)
;a:  (-66,-128) (1,0) (68,127)
;b:  (-70,-128) (-3,0) (64,127)
I get...



His face is much darker than I would like, but I am attempting to retain the sky - and just look at the lovely blue jumper!!

Notice I have not (bothered?) to set a shadow (as Lab 0,0,0 already exists in the image) or a highlight as lab L=97 is high enough (on the top of his shoulder) and it would be nice to attempt to retain some sort of detail in the white bits of his jumper. 

My own 1st attempt with Lab was to get the skin colour right and is completely different from the above.  I have a feeling that with curves alone, there is no solution to this - certainly in Lab.

I'm sure Mike is going to show us later how CM3 can fix this problem - but I still think we could learn alot by trying to fix it with simple curves.

Greg's image gave up too much in the highlights, losing detail in the shoulders and other areas of bright clothing, and did not cash in on the shadows - so I would add a bit of steepness to the dark end of the Lightness curve as well, resulting in an inverted S curve, sacrificing midtone detail in exchange for highlight and shadow detail.

This is a fairly difficult image.  At this point we're not really dealing with neutrals and color casts, just shadow and highlight.  If you are just starting would be well advised to wait until later before tackling it.  That said, I'd like to mention that a good neutral is something that you know should be gray, but that isn't.  Making the object that should be neutral gray, by setting a neutral at that location, will result in an overall improvement in the image.

Picking a neutral needs to be more than an educated guess.  Dan Margulis uses the phrase "betting the image" to underscore the importance of knowing that a neutral is neutral.  Unless you are very confident, it's generally a poor idea to just take a stab at the neutral.  For example, a shirt or other item that you think is white may be a light shade of yellow or blue.  Jeans are not a good selection since they are more often a shade of blue than gray, and may even be other colors.  The shirts and jumpers are a more likely choice for neutral, and since I took the image, you can take my word for it that this is actually the case.