PROBOSCIS MONKEY

[mikemeister_admin]

my first try!
placing a mark-info on his nose told me that it is equal or nearly equal on the first skin-tone.
But still I placed a skintone on his nose.
Again the question, how do i know in practice the arm is nearly gray without Mike to tell me.

frits

[mikemeister_admin]

here  is  a RGB Proboscis monkey. a new specimen.

Frits

[mikemeister_admin]

here is the same monkey in wgCMYKmode.

Frits

[mikemeister_admin]

HSB-monkey,
Have you ever seen that ?
Indeed it is very difficult in HSB but I have tried it.
I worked onluy in HSB-mode.
I have placed a blackpoint and a neutral.
the neutral helped but not entirely.
Mike has once told that  skintones can sometimes substitute  the place of a sort of neutral.
So i placed the skintome on his snout. This helpled a lot.
After that  imodified with a controlpoint the saturation.
So now, the neutral-point is indeed neutral
To do something on the green color, I could not in HSB.
So what , I know that.

frits

[ggroess]

Well Fritz,
I took up the torch on the HSB correction to this image...

You can add some Green back into the image..I tried a quick and dirty pass at this.

If you look at my Hue curve..you will see control points above and below the skin tone pin.  I felt I needed to protect it from the change I needed to make to get the green back.  It does limit the overall correction and I supose I should revisit this to see if I can open the curve up a bit to get back some more color...

This is just one quick way of getting there in HSB...This image is really not suited for that...Color cast is really a ugly thing in HSB.

Greg

[-default]

Hi Frits,

Your image looks quite good.  You are making life more difficult for yourself, though, by keeping the skin tone pin locked.  This restricts the movement of the a and b curves.  If you unpin the skin tone you will be able to keep the a and b curves straight, and change only the end points of those two curves, using the skin hue clock as a guide.  Then use Lightness to change the overall contrast.

The question of how you know the monkey's arm is gray without me saying so is a very good one, and points toward an advanced concept of "betting the image".  Without additional information, you don't really know what the colors are.  But let's suppose that didn't know the color of the monkey's arm, or the branch he is sleeping on.  But we're not entirely clueless about the colors.  We can be pretty certain of these things:

The monkey is not green.  There are a few species of monkey that are a dark shade of yellow-green, this is not one of them.
The tree branch might be yellow , but this is unlikely.  It is much more likely to be a reddish brown, green, or a gray
The monkey and branch are not magenta, cyan, or blue.

Conclusion: the monkey and tree are almost certain to be shades of red, yellow, or gray.

After cruising around the image with the hue clock, I concluded that everything in the image, with the exception of the plants in the background, is yellow.  The tree branch and  the monkey's fur are yellow everywhere.  The monkey's skin tone is also on the yellow side of a normal skin tone.  Even if you are not sure about the colors, it's a pretty safe bet that moving things away from yellow, and toward blue is going to create a more attractive image, with more variety in the colors.  I doing this, we are simulating the eye's accommodation, filtering out an ambient color.

Dan Margulis uses the phrase "betting the image" to mean making an educated guess based on the numbers - this includes the hue clock in our case.  In this case, it seems like a winner's strategy to reject the colder colors (green, blue, cyan) for the monkey and branch, and place our bets on the warmer colors, particularly the skin tones, since that is the theme of this exercise.

The end result of this move toward blue, and I think you will probably agree that the image looks better. The fact that it is also more accurate is icing on the cake (do they use that expression in Holland?).

This is also an illustration of how using your eye is a poor way to judge the colors.  Since your eye will accomodate tot the yellow, it is harder to accurately remove the cast.  Once done, though, the difference is very clear. 

It's interesting to think about the case of an image filled with spheres, cubes, and cones, all in different shades of yellow.  For that particular image, absent any information about the actual colors, neither you nor I would have any idea what the correct colors were.  What would you do in that case?  Should the objects be made neutral, left as-is, or something else? 

BTW - Here is another image of a similar monkey that you may want to try color correcting.
http://z.about.com/d/goasia/1/0/1/L/2/ProboscisMonkey.jpg

[mikemeister_admin]

Hi Frits,

Your image looks quite good.  You are making life more difficult for yourself, though, by keeping the skin tone pin locked.  This restricts the movement of the a and b curves.  If you unpin the skin tone you will be able to keep the a and b curves straight, and change only the end points of those two curves, using the skin hue clock as a guide.  Then use Lightness to change the overall contrast.

The question of how you know the monkey's arm is gray without me saying so is a very good one, and points toward an advanced concept of "betting the image".  Without additional information, you don't really know what the colors are.  But let's suppose that didn't know the color of the monkey's arm, or the branch he is sleeping on.   But we're not entirely clueless about the colors.  We can be pretty certain of these things:

The monkey is not green.  There are a few species of monkey that are a dark shade of yellow-green, this is not one of them.
The tree branch might be yellow , but this is unlikely.  It is much more likely to be a reddish brown, green, or a gray
The monkey and branch are not magenta, cyan, or blue.

Conclusion: the monkey and tree are almost certain to be shades of red, yellow, or gray.

After cruising around the image with the hue clock, I concluded that everything in the image, with the exception of the plants in the background, is yellow.  The tree branch and  the monkey's fur are yellow everywhere.  The monkey's skin tone is also on the yellow side of a normal skin tone.  Even if you are not sure about the colors, it's a pretty safe bet that moving things away from yellow, and toward blue is going to create a more attractive image, with more variety in the colors.  I doing this, we are simulating the eye's accommodation, filtering out an ambient color.

Dan Margulis uses the phrase "betting the image" to mean making an educated guess based on the numbers - this includes the hue clock in our case.  In this case, it seems like a winner's strategy to reject the colder colors (green, blue, cyan) for the monkey and branch, and place our bets on the warmer colors, particularly the skin tones, since that is the theme of this exercise.

The end result of this move toward blue, and I think you will probably agree that the image looks better. The fact that it is also more accurate is icing on the cake (do they use that expression in Holland?).

This is also an illustration of how using your eye is a poor way to judge the colors.  Since your eye will accomodate tot the yellow, it is harder to accurately remove the cast.  Once done, though, the difference is very clear. 

It's interesting to think about the case of an image filled with spheres, cubes, and cones, all in different shades of yellow.  For that particular image, absent any information about the actual colors, neither you nor I would have any idea what the correct colors were.  What would you do in that case?  Should the objects be made neutral, left as-is, or something else? 

BTW - Here is another image of a similar monkey that you may want to try color correcting.
http://z.about.com/d/goasia/1/0/1/L/2/ProboscisMonkey.jpg

Did this monkey mahe an informed decision about cosmetic surgery?GregM

[-default]

He considered it, but the impact on his show biz career would have been prohibitive.
http://www.ufomystic.com/wake-up-down-there/flying-saucer-music-26/

[mikemeister_admin]

Greg,

good morning!
so I did the HSB  proboscis (long snout) monkey again.
But with a little changed approach.
First I put a mark under the arm on the green leave.
So i will try to keep that green.
In the curves I put a controlpoint exactly on the green mark point.
After that I did the usual what i did before.
So the arm becomes neutral and the grreen stays good.

Frits

[mikemeister_admin]

AGAIN the monkey in lab mode and trying to unlock the skin tone, like Mike suggested.
When you lock it, you can good see the lockpoints in the curves. ( i use 2 monitors)
So you know how it approximately must be.
So I tried several times with unlocked skintone, and find it difficult.
so i think i succeeded  now. Perjhaps the monkey is to  red now, but the skin tone is on his  bandwidth.