I was taking pictures for our house composite, and while they said I couldn’t use this one, it was my personal fave. ;) I’ll be putting up more of these once selections are made and editing has been done.

Also, I’m STILL fighting this damn magenta cast I keep getting in jpegs. I’ve been working my way through a book on color correcting in Photoshop, and my tiff of this looks AWESOME, but I can’t make it convert right! Grr. Any photogs out there got tips?

These are from a set of portraits I did for my friend Jasmina. She just took a job with a cosmetics company and needed some publicity pictures. I was quite honored to be asked. :)

My last few weeks have been insanely busy – next week is the end of classes, so of course this week is the end-game for all projects & assignments. Sarah wanted her pictures edited so she could give some to her parents for Christmas (which made me happy :) ) so I squeezed in some editing time. I’ll show the full finished set in another post – right now I wanted to share an interesting observation about how color channels work when editing portraits.

For those of you who don’t spend too much of your lives in the Adobe suite, every color in the subset of colors allowed in the RGB color space can be represented  as percentages of red, green, and blue. Those of you who have ever worked in web design are familiar with this concept (though you may not know it) through hexidecimal color values. These are hexidecimal (base 16) numbers with 6 hex digits. The first two represent the level of red, the next two green, the last two blue. The highest, #FFFFFF, is white – every color is saturated to the max. The lowest is, logically, black represented by #000000. Every combination in between results in a color, such as #9A32DF, #CC6688, or #123456.

(There’s also the CMYK color space, which represents all colors in mixes of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. RGB and CMYK are both widely used, but RGB is typically how colors on the web are displayed while CMYK is the scheme usually used for printed images.)

This is the idea behind color channels in photoshop – you can view an image which displays, in greyscale, only the red, green, or blue values in the image. The best way that I know of to turn a colored image into a black and white one is to use Photoshop’s monochrome channel mixer. You can use the different RGB values as brightness levels and mesh them together by percentages to get a properly balanced B&W image. Here’s an example to give you a general idea.

This is the original:

These are the channels:

Here’s what happens when you go to grayscale (though I have no idea why you’d want to with this image) through different methods:

Not only is the black/white balance nicer, but the channel version preserves a lot of the detail in the seeds and veins of the berries that are missing in the mode conversion. I also balanced it to lose some of the less important, distracting details in the meringue base.

So, after a lengthy explanation, to my original point. My previous post about photo editing involved a lot of nit-picky steps: fix the skin, fix the eyes, fix the lips, etc. When I went to turn one of the portraits into the traditional B&W actor headshot, I found most of it was done in a single step. Behold:

The original:

The channels: (from the top down: red, green, blue)

Notice anything about the red channel? Yeah, the skin is flawless. Contrast isn’t bad either. A little washed out of course, but it’s not going to take much to fix that. Here’s the final, mixed version:

This is 80% red, 20% green. It could definitely use a little bit of touching up in spots, but the mixing itself did most of my work for me.

Which, as you know, is always a plus.

I’m editing the rest of the photos from the shoot with Sarah, and it’s really fun! This is the first time I’ve seriously done retouching on pictures of people, and while I’m not the greatest at it, the process itself is pretty nifty. First, a note about color – I am not the color space whiz some of my friends are, and the colors in my photoshop version are much less red-tinted than these. I played with it for a long time and couldn’t get them to match. :( If I ever figure out how to get it to work I’ll let you know that as well (I’m sure you’ll all be thrilled). All these images link to larger versions, as I know my blog layout somewhat limits my image width.

The Original:

A decent picture to begin with, but it could use some work. Let’s start off by making some “physical” modifications.

Step 1: Skin blemishes

Pimples are never fun, especially when immortalized in a photo. A quick application of the clone tool and the worst of those spots are gone!

Step 2: Shine

Unless you’re a lighting expert with a fantastic makeup team, you’re going to get some glare off the skin of your model. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I just nabbed some skintone with the eyedropper tool and colored over the skin on an above layer. Once it’s good and covered, reduce the opacity to about 50% and those shiny spots are much less lustrous.

Step 3: Curves

No, I don’t mean bodywork, I mean the fancy schmancy way to say “contrast.”

Step 4: Background Color

After the contrast made my subject look so good, that background looks rather drab. Let’s get rid of it.

Step 5: Eyes

Those eyes are a lovely blue but they’re not standing out very much after that contrast change. I added a new layer and colored over the iris with a bit of color pulled from the eye, then made that a “color dodge” layer. (To see this change well, check out the full size)

Step 6: Lips

Again, without a makeup artist the natural colors of the face can be lost to the flash. Luckily, a hue/saturation layer with a mask over the lips solves that issue. Unfortunately, the color problems I mentioned at the beginning rather obscure this change, but there is still a visible difference.

Step 7: Skin

The final touch was some obscuring of the lines around the mouth, again with the clone tool, and then a general Gaussian blur over all the exposed skin area. For that, I copied the layer, blurred it, dropped the opacity a bit, then erased everything but the actual skin areas. The last thing we want is to lose detail in the eyes, mouth, and hair!

And that’s it. Not the greatest editing ever, but perhaps my best effort to date. She got these done for an auditioning gig so we’ll see how it goes. :) I’ve got a LOT more of these in the queue for editing, as well as a whole separate photoshoot I haven’t revealed yet. That one is going to be fun. For now I’ll just say it involves diapers, batteries, and m&m’s.

This is a rather old project, but I’m still fairly proud of it so I thought I’d put it up here. I’ve been surfing Craigslist for photography jobs to spend my time and creative energy on, and I finally set up a gig shooting actor headshots for these young twins. Check out the results: