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Correcting Colour on Bridesmaid Dress Photo


Saloula

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Well her is my big challenge of the week.... Can anyone advise me how I can make the skirt part of this dress ivory colour like the bodice, rather than appearing a grey gradient all the way down the skirt now. It looked good as the original photo but now that I have cut it out and put it on a white background it looks so weird!! Also the see through tulle fabric at that shows really dark grey at the bottom of the dress should be a lighter ivory colour if there is any ideas how to do that too!

Belle.jpg
 
First of all, Duplicate your layer Ctrl/Command J. Then, use a Levels Adjustment layer. Your right hand slider will make your whites brighter. Move those sliders (all 3) until your satisfied. If you want, you can change the opacity in the layers panel or if you just want part of the image to be adjusted with the results, apply a layer mask. enter Ctrl/Command I to invert the mask (it will be black now), then grab your paint brush loaded with white and start painting on the mask and you can apply your brighter color to the parts of the dress you want to.
Well her is my big challenge of the week.... Can anyone advise me how I can make the skirt part of this dress ivory colour like the bodice, rather than appearing a grey gradient all the way down the skirt now. It looked good as the original photo but now that I have cut it out and put it on a white background it looks so weird!! Also the see through tulle fabric at that shows really dark grey at the bottom of the dress should be a lighter ivory colour if there is any ideas how to do that too!

View attachment 49988
 
If you are looking to learn how to do something along these lines, let me know, and I'll write it up. BTW, I intentionally over-did the effect to make it clear. Obviously, the effect can be dialed back / refined.

Tom M
 

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WOW!!
That’s just right!!
Thanks both of you for your replies!

Only thing is I don’t really understand how to do it on my own

OK, so I duplicated layer using right click-duplicate, ( duplicated as background copy)

The whites I had already made brighter from Image- Adjustments –Brightness/contrast.

The opacity of the layers panel won’t change, when I try to change it from the 100% to see what happens it just goes back to 100% again.

How do I apply the layer mask? I can see from the menu Layer - Layer mask - Reveal all or Hide all.

Tom Mann, did you do it another way? Can you me give me more detailed instructions?
 
"How do I apply the layer mask? I can see from the menu Layer - Layer mask - Reveal all or Hide all."

You can also invert the Mask by holding the Alt key and clicking on the Layer Mask Icon

View attachment 50008 Layer Mask Icon

"The opacity of the layers panel won’t change, when I try to change it from the 100% to see what happens it just goes back to 100% again"

Brightness and Contrast Adjustment over done just for demo

View attachment 50009

Effect after lowering the Opacity

View attachment 50010

I sure ALB68 and Tom Mann will give you detailed instruction on how to achieve your goal, hope my bit helps a little :)
 
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I was remiss in my reading of your post. I understood you wanted instruction . Layer masks are very powerful. When I get to my computer I will post some more info for you.
 
Saloula,
Layer masks are at the heart of Photoshop. Leaning to use them puts you in control of adjustments of most any kind. You can control application of filters (which can be considered destructive unless you use Smart filters). Apply a filter to a layer, then apply a mask and paint in the areas where you want the filter effect if not on the whole layer. For your issue I didn't post my result as we encourage OP's to do their own work and learn from the replies. I used a levels adjustment layer, but could have used other methods such as the brightness and contrast layer as gedstar posted. That's the beauty of computers, usually several different ways of doing things to arrive at the same result. Here is a link to the more info on the subject http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/layers/layer-masks/
 
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Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to write this up, but will be sure to do so very late tonight.

Tom
 
Here is what I did last. This attempts to come closer to the color of the top of the dress.
dress.JPG
 
When one is faced with a task such as this, it is important to start by carefully analyzing the problem. I'll often try to state the problem to myself in as simple, accurate, and actionable terms as possible. In this case, I described (to myself) the major problem as "brighten and add yellow to the bottom half and (viewer's) LHS of the dress, especially the darker areas".

A statement like this is almost a direct roadmap of the tasks ahead. For example, from it, it is clear that one will have to make separate selections (equivalent to layer masks) of the areas mentioned. So, developing these was the very first thing I did. Here are the layer masks I used:

a) The entire dress - needed to build the other masks, as well as on its own to prevent unintended changes to the white background :

Mask-entire_dress.jpg

b) Emphasizing the bottom half with a smooth transition to no efx applied to the upper half of the dress:

Mask-emphasizes_and_blends_bottom_half.jpg

c) Selecting just the bottom edge of the dress and underlying material for separate, extra brightening and color treatment:

Mask-bottom_edge.jpg

d) Selecting just the lower left hand edge (ie, towards the rear of the dress) for separate, extra treatment:

Mask-emphasize-LLH_edge.jpg


e) To emphasize the shadow areas in the various adjustments that need to be made, rather than making a luminance mask (which I would have done had the selection problem been more difficult), I simply used the Blend-IF sliders in the layer properties of almost all of the adjustment layers that I used:

BlendIF_settings-emphasizes_darks.jpg


The next step is to decide on which will be the best methods to use "to lighten" and "to add yellow" in the various areas. As usual, in PS, there are many, many different ways to accomplish these tasks. To be honest, the only real way to select the best approach for a particular situation is to have extensive experience with the various options, and chose from among them on the basis of "best intended effect", "fewest unwanted / unintended side effects", "ease/speed of use", "general availability", etc.

As an example, to accomplish brightening, I could have used any of the following types of adjustment layers: "Curves", "Levels", the brightness slider in a "Brightness / Contrast" layer, or many other approaches. I didn't need the exquisite control that "Curves" offers, and I hate the brightness slider in "Brightness / Contrast", so I used several "Levels" adjustment layers (ie, one for each of the above areas listed).

To accomplish "adding yellow", again there are dozens of different ways to do this using only Photoshop's native tools, and hundreds of different ways if you include third party add-ins. I decided to use a "Color Balance" adjustment layer primarily because it's fast, simple, and I know that it allows one to easily target only the shadow areas.

Color_balance-yellows_shadow_areas.jpg Color_balance-no_change_to_midtones_and_highlights.jpg

So, my approach was to simply go through the various areas (listed above), and add separate, appropriately masked "Levels" and a "Color Bal" adjustment layers for each area.

BTW, don't let the above description intimidate you. This approach sounds much more difficult and time consuming than it really is. In actuality, it probably took me only 5 minutes to do the work and 30 minutes to write up this description of my general approach. Writing up a full tutorial would take even longer, and, unfortunately, I just don't have the time to do it.

Besides, IMHO, learning a general approach like this will likely be more useful in the long term than having to plod through a detailed step-by-step tutorial and then figure out for yourself why the instructor did what he did.

HTH,

Tom M
 
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PS - BTW, My layer stack couldn't have been simpler. It consisted of nothing more than the original (at the very bottom of the stack), and a bunch of adjustment layers stacked on top of it. Never once did I turn the adjustments into an ordinary pixel-based layer. The advantage of doing it this way is that often the various efx interact visually with each other, and one needs to compensate for this once all the efx are in place. Using only adjustment layers, there's absolutely no problem to go to one of the adjustment layers, move a slider or two, and immediately see the effect on the overall image. In contrast, if you bake in your adjustments to actual pixel layers, repeatedly applying efx in the process of tweaking it to optimizing the overall look almost always results in a reduction of quality.

Tom
 
Thanks to all of you so far!
Yes I want instruction as I have many photos I need to touch up in this way as I have an online store selling bridesmaid dresses etc. I will study your answers and see what I can manage with my other photo's too!
Tom Mann - If you do have time tonight that will be great!!!! :)
 

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