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Guide me pls!


Marc_Gforce

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I have two pictures. Let's call this picture is A

7bd4e07.jpg

And this picture is B

79a4af2.jpg

I want to make B have the same color at A so I use Match color but when I do, it look like this

811ff15.png

Pls help me!!!!!!!!
 
I do not say it is impossible, I am saying it is very hard, just because the information is not there. A is well lit and shot picture, B is a bad underexposed shot. It would be much easier to reshot it.
 
I dont know if you want to use the second beccause is more fun or the books, but you can try to combine both instead. This is a fast example. Still a hard work to do to match it well.

f2.jpg
 
If you cannot reshot and it is a part of the album, I would think about some special effect if I were you. Like monochromatic, maybe some blur around, whatever any person with more artistic talent than me ( almost anybody ) can come up with.
 
My guess is that your strobes didn't fire on this shot, and hence, instead of nice, frontal, well-color balanced lighting, the girl was instead lit by overhead, greenish fluorescent lights.

As Pete (ie, "peta") has already said, the best way to solve this problem is to re-shoot the image. However, if this really is impossible or is not cost-effective, about the only way you are going to come close in post processing is by picking apart the image, area by area and applying separate color and tonal corrections (including dodging and burning) to each area, particularly, the face. The best I felt like doing (devoting 10 minutes of work to it) is the attached image. It's not great, but maybe it will be acceptable.

Tom M
 

Attachments

  • 79a4af2-underexposed-tjm01-acr-ps02a_16bpc_sRGB-03.jpg
    79a4af2-underexposed-tjm01-acr-ps02a_16bpc_sRGB-03.jpg
    392.3 KB · Views: 9
Tom Mann - man you are true magician. The only thing that bothers me is the purple in her hair, she does not have it in the other photo and it definitely comes from the fluorescent light as you described.
 
@Tom Mann - man you are true magician. The only thing that bothers me is the purple in her hair, she does not have it in the other photo and it definitely comes from the fluorescent light as you described.
Thanks for pointing that out, Pete! That's always the danger of sending an image off before you sleep on it -- one is so concentrating on fixing other aspects of the image, they miss something obvious like the hair -- just like I did, LOL.

@Tom Mann - you're awsome, but I'm not understand how you do it. could you walk me through it ???
Hi Marc - As you can probably guess from my comments and those of some of the other participants in the thread, fixing this image in PS was far from simple. I probably had a dozen saved masks / selections, and easily at least 2 or 3 dozen different adjustment layers. In your "Hello" posting, you mentioned that you were a beginner in Photoshop, so I don't feel it would be a good idea for you to use the method I used on this image to learn from. Instead, I would suggest starting the process of learning PS with a much simpler task. For example, Peta62 correctly pointed out that I left the girl's hair a bit purple. Why don't you try to fix that one specific problem, post what you have done, and we'll go from there.

With respect to the exact method I used, here's a quick summary. Like everyone else probably did, I started by simply trying tools such as the "levels", "curves" and "exposure" adjustment layers. I also tried to use ACR by itself. After a few seconds playing around like this, I quickly realized that the fundamental problem was not the quantity of the light, or even the color, but the quality, ie, in what direction was it coming from, what was I going to do with the unwanted shadows that the fluorescent lights cast, pulling deeply shadowed areas out of the mud without introducing lots of noise, etc. This realization led me to the method I described in my earlier post:

"... the only way you are going to come close in post processing is by picking apart the image, area by area and applying separate color and tonal corrections (including dodging and burning) to each area, particularly, the face. ..."

In other words, I started by constructing and saving layer masks for each of the different areas in the image, e.g., each of the books, the newspaper background, the face, the hair, etc., and, for convenience, various combinations of the preceding areas, and variants of the previous with one of the edges blurred to provide a smooth transition to an adjacent area. Then, based on my experience with PS, I selected a set of appropriate tools, typically, at least the following adjustment layers, "curves", "hue/saturation", "selective color", put them in a group, put the appropriate layer mask on the group, and started adjusting the areas, one-by-one. In addition, for some areas, I needed to adjust the shadows and highlights separately, so I either used the "dodge" and "burn" tools, or used the "BlendIF" sliders on particular adjustment layers to selectively target either the shadows or the highlights. Obviously, one needs a well-developed "eye" and lots of previous experience with these tools so that one doesn't wind up with something that looks like a patchwork quilt or the photographic equivalent of a ransom note, LOL.

This is what I consider a brute-force approach to improving an image like this. I don't like having to work this way, but in tough cases, it gets the job done. This is why I wouldn't recommend that you use this image (as a whole) for any beginner to start to learn PS.

HTH,

Tom M
 
Although I was sure you used camera raw, I was looking at ACR for some time before I decoded it means Adobe Camera Raw. Wondering whether my brain still sleeps :-(
 
That's funny. It sounds like how my brain works, LOL.

BTW, I think that at least some people try to distinguish between ACR (using Camera Raw) as a preprocessor before PS, and the "Camera Raw filter" which is used from within Photoshop. I'm sloppy and call them both ACR, and if one needs to distinguish between them, I'll either be explicit or make sure it should be obvious from the context.

In the case of this image, since we weren't given the raw data file for it, there is effectively no difference if ACR is used as a pre-processor or is used within PS, or, for that matter, if the essentially identical ACR features of LR were used as a pre processor.

Cheers,

Tom M
 
Tom Mann: Thanks man. I've tried to do it but it didn't work. And I think I won't be able to do it soon so, if you can, can you give me a more specific instruction to fix that photo cause I have about 7 more photos like that and I have to finished the album the day after tomorrow.
 
Last edited:
...if you can, can you give me a more specific instruction to fix that photo cause I have about 7 more photos like that and I have to finished the album the day after tomorrow.

I'm sorry to hear that you are on a deadline, but *please* re-read post #12 in this thread carefully. To summarize it (and to be a bit more direct), you are by your own admission a beginner at Photoshop, and this photo, while seemingly simple to repair, actually required quite a complex fix.

Unfortunately, you just haven't yet built up the necessary skills and experienced "eye" to do what I described in that post. My suggestion would be to farm out the work to someone in your company more advanced than you.

Sorry,

Tom M
 

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