Here is the before:

Before removing color cast (see under her chin!)

And now the after:

After removing the green color cast

The great thing about my technique to do this is that it is QUICK and you dont’ have to be very precise. I’m sure there are many other ways to do it, but this works great for me, which is why I’m sharing it with you!

Let me know if you have any questions! :)

Which of course makes it tricky to adjust it’s color – you always end up needing to mask back your subject’s skin because skin contains a lot of yellow.

So when you want to adjust your grass color, you will be working with the yellows.  Here are my two favorite tricks for making grass look lush:

1) Do a hue saturation layer and select yellows from the drop down. Move the hue slider slightly to the right, essentially adding more blue.

2) Do a selective color layer and select yellows from the dropdown.  Bring the magenta slider down – a lot. I find that blah grass tends to have a lot of magenta in it, probably the deadish and dry grass is redish.  You can even do the same in the neutrals dropdown for a more dramatic effect.

Here is a before and after of a small adjustment to bring down the magenta in the yellows:

before

after

It’s a subtle but nice difference – the after definitely has a more “lush” look.

One thing to keep in mind is that bright/overly saturated grass can go nuclear really fast and actually be out of gamut, which means that your lab can’t print that crazy psychedelic green! That’s where soft proofing with your lab’s profiles can be  really important so you know exactly what you’ll be getting.

I realized after recording this that I left a couple of important things out.. you can not use content aware scale on an image that is your locked background layer. You have to have the image you are trying to stretch be a layer on TOP of your background layer.  The easiest way to achieve this is if you create a PSD file that is the size that you want to stretch the canvas to and then copy or duplicate the image into that document as a separate layer. Then you are good to go to scale that image to the size of your canvas!

Otherwise if you are just starting from your image as a jpg or RAW file you can go to canvas size and make your canvas larger. Then, go to your background layer and use the marquis tool to select the original size of your image (i.e. leaving off the white or black fill that is now around it) and then copy and paste that into a new photoshop layer before you scale it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

We’ve never delved into channels before here (except for channels adjustment layer tweaks) and truth be told I’d forgotten what a useful tool channels are to have in your photoshop arsenal until recently!

Here we cover how to make adjustments to spot areas that lack detail and also how you can use the information from one channel to spruce up your black and white conversions.

Let me know if you have any questions!

He was in NO MOOD for photos, in fact he was completely unwilling to part with Paci, I had to play tug of war with him just to steal it and get just one paci free shot.  Oh well, at least he kept his hat on!

(see these bigger on my photography website)
Images taken with the 5D Mark II, Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 Lens wide open at 2.8, SS 350 and ISO 100

I’ve been really loving B&W and backlighting lately..there’s just something so magical about it.  I was really happy to discover a free b&w action set someone posted a link to on Clickinmoms. It’s a simple gradient layer conversion, but there are some other layers you can toggle on and off to customize it and even adjust the contrast layer for example (I find that the blacks are a bit too black so often slide the right slider back over to the left on the “contrast pop” layer).

But this isn’t just a plain B&W conversion action, it also has a set of haze and overlay actions that are pretty fun to play around with.

You can get the action from Amy McMaster’s blog and see some examples too.

Enjoy!

Second of all, I am thrilled to report that DST has saved my sanity. Jasper has been sleeping until a thoroughly blissful 7-8am – woohoo!  How did it go for all you guys?

Ok, so now about the topic of today’s post, noise (i.e. that pixely gunk that makes our images look crappy when we use a high ISO).

This weekend we took Jasper to the mall to get out of the awful weather and give him a chance to run around a bit… and he ran RIGHT to the area with the little rides.  We spent at least $10 on these rides (not hard at a dollar a pop!) but it was worth it to placate a whiny toddler!

As you might imagine, indoors at a mall is not bright enough to shoot without a flash. But it’s also not an ideal place to bounce flash because there were no nearby walls or even ceilings. So I had to crank my ISO up to 3200 (f2.8, ss 1/160th) to get enough light.  Of course that means tons of noise!  That’s where noiseware comes in.

Noiseware is a plugin by imagenomic that does some sort of hokus pocus and magically gets rid of noise better than any program I’ve ever used!

Here is a a 100% crop taken from the plugin showing the before and after side by side:

Pretty nifty huh? Obviously things still don’t look perfect at a 100% crop, but that is to be expected.

What I hadn’t realized before trying noiseware is that even when used on images without a whole lot of noise it gives this sort of polished look that I really like.  It’s definitely no portraiture when it comes to skin, but it DOES give a very subtle smoothing effect that is quite flattering.

Lest you damn me to hell for recommending yet ANOTHER way for you to spend money, the kind people at imagenomic have decided to offer becoming-mom readers a 15% discount on any of their products!  Use code MOMMYBLOG at checkout.

I was not paid, given a free review or otherwise compensated for writing this review – I just really love this product and thought you would too.. I know that noise particularly on entry level DSLRs is a constant source of annoyance, hopefully this will help!

Like many things in post processing, there is an easy way and a hard way.. the easy way usually involves parting with some hard earned cash and this is no exception!  On freckly/sun damaged skin like mine, I could spend hours using the spot healing brush tool… or I can run a photoshop plugin called Portraiture and be done in about 2 seconds!

To demonstrate, I am going to use the images of me modeling my mom’s jewelry for her new etsy shop because it strikes me as a bit unkind to use a female client of mine to demonstrate someone who needs skin retouching!

Ok, so here is the before picture (can you see me cringing and covering my eyes with my hand??)

and here is after using portraiture on a separate layer and reducing the opacity to about 75%

Pretty fantastic no?

What portraiture does is look for skin colored areas and smooths them and then adds that adjustment to a new layer so you can reduce the opacity and erase back areas that you don’t want smoothed.  You can completely tweak to taste and necessity.   Like most things, moderation is key: I see some people totally abusing portraiture to the point where children look like plastic dolls – I don’t recommend going for that look, it’s rather creepy actually!

To further “perfect” this portrait I would use the patch or the spot healing brush tool to get rid of that deep furrow above my brow – (I think botox may be in my future!)  I went over that technique in the second part of my newborn processing tutorial so I’m not going to repeat myself, but if you aren’t familiar with these tools, it’s totally worth the time to play around with them.

Lastly,  close up portraits really require a subtle hand when output sharpening.  I usually sharpen all of my images for web viewing using Unsharp Mask at an amount of 100-400% and a radius of .2 and a threshold of 0 and adjust to taste.  But global sharpening can do nasty things to skin, particularly when you’ve taken so much time and care to smooth the skin out -why introduce harshness in the sharpening step?

That’s where edge sharpening comes in.

Jodi from MCP actions has an EXCELLENT edge sharpening tutorial and FREE action on her blog. I highly, highly recommend it.

So, here’s the final result, portraiture, some “healing brush” and some edge sharpening which mostly applied it to my eyes, lips  and some bits of hair:

One more thing: Imagenomic offers a free 15 day trial of Portraiture so you can try it before you decide if it’s worth the $200. I apologize in advance for adding something more to your photography wishlist, but hey, I also linked you to an awesome free action right?

ETA: After the publishing of this post, the kind folks at imagenomic offered to give becoming-mom readers a coupon for 15% off any of their products! Use the code MOMMYBLOG. hmmm, how appropriate!  I am not receiving any financial incentive for your purchases at imagenomic, just in case you were wondering ;)

So we will cover how to go from blue blotchy baby:

to gorgeous warm creamy skin!

This video is in two parts because it’s a bit long.. the first part covers how I use a digital grey kard while I’m shooting , how I use it to adjust white balance in LR (or ACR it would be the same) and then how I use an inverted highlights selection to brighten everything but the highlights:

The second part covers using the spot healing and patch tools to get rid of blotches and blemishes and also how to use a levels adjustment layer mask to get rid of any remaining dark magenta areas:

Let me know if you have any questions!

PS, I did this on a different monitor that hasn’t been calibrated for quite some time, so my skin tones may be look  a tad off, but the principles are the same :)

How to use Lightroom (or ACR) to adjust the white balance of your image and then how to check and finetune it in Photoshop. This tutorial uses the CMY % method of correct skintones that I first learned about in Katrin Eismann’s book, but she credits Dan Margules for the theory.

It sates that the C value should be 30-50% of the M value, and that the Y value should be 1/5-1/3 higher than the M value.

BTW, C=Cyan, Y=Yellow and M=Magenta!

In this tutorial I eyeball the correct WB and then check my percentages using the info palette in PS. I then use a color balance adjustment layer to tweak as necessary.

You can see from the brief bit of playing I do with the color balance controls how much easier it is to get in the ballpark with just those two WB sliders.

As always, post any questions in the comments.

xoxo

PS, big thank you to Amanda from the Clickin Moms forum for allowing me to use her gorgeous photo for this tutorial! :)

PPS: IMPORTANT! In the like 5 minutes since I posted this I have been involved in a discussion where it was pointed out that Katrin Eismann’s #s might be a little heavy on the cyan and that the correct ration is actually C= 1/5-1/3 of the M value.  I didn’t want to rerecord the tutorial,  but the same technique applies, you would just warm up the image even further in LR or ACR than I did until that C value dropped even more.

This is something I just learned how to do.. select JUST the highlights of an image so you can invert the selection and brighten everything BUT the highlights. Why is this useful? Because so often there are  some areas on the subjects face that are already close to clipping (a value of 255) particularly in the red channel but you still want to brighten or add contrast.. this is one method of doing just that.

I also show how you can use a selective color layer to just add blacks to give a further effect of adding contrast without effecting bright areas.

The before and after difference are subtle but trust me this is a useful thing to know..

Watch it below or click here to see a larger version. Have a great weekend!