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Pimp My Pic #2

Posted on January 2, 2012

Welcome to the second edition of Pimp My Pic!

I’ve had such a cruddy holiday week off with my blood pressure being elevated, the kidlet being a major pill, and my dear husband practicing throat clearing and snorting as if he were preparing to compete in these events during the next Olympics. Even though I did receive my coveted 105 2.8 Nikon micro lens and a battery pack for the Precious, I’ve felt so awful that I haven’t done much in the photography realm. I had such big plans to get the 2012 kidlet and client calendars done, as well as finishing a product guide for EJP. Sigh… It did not happen.

But today on Facebook, I saw an image so adorable that I just had to broach my friend Tara about Pimping Her Pic! She had a fantastic shot of her daughter, Kaia, that needed a little pimping to bring out its full glory. So after I put The Pill to bed, I got to work.

Here is the original image of this adorable cutie pie:

Step 1: Importing into Photoshop

The first thing I did was to import the photo into PS. Initially this brings up the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) dialogue box. ACR allows you to make adjustments before the file is even opened in Photoshop proper.

What we notice here is that Kaia’s face is underexposed while there are blown (overexposed) areas in her hair where the sun hit (red highlights). Were I to venture a guess about why her face came out underexposed, I would say that the most common culprit is matrix metering. When you use matrix metering, the camera balances the exposure choice over the entire frame rather than knowing that you’d prefer HER to be adjusted for. And in a back/side lit situation like this, the camera usually gets it wrong. Using spot metering and metering on the skin of the subject is a way to get the subject’s exposure right in camera, though it will still take some manual adjustments in many cases.

Step 2: Adjust White Balance

Adjusting white balance in this photo was very tricky because there were few neutral color items that I could click on with the WB dropper tool to adjust the white balance. You look for neutral gray, or you can use white in a pinch. I ended up using the whites of her eyes, but still didn’t feel certain that I got the color correct. I knew I would have to do more skin correction later in PS.

Step 3: Adjust exposure

My goal here was to adjust the exposure for her skin tones and not worry about the background or the blown areas in her hair. As you can see above, I ended up increasing the exposure by a full stop (and I still wasn’t sure she was bright enough).

Step 4: Recovery

I used the recovery slider to get back as much of the blown areas in her hair as I could. I also added a little black for definition. I then opened the photo in Photoshop.

Of course when you fix underexposure so dramatically, you end up with a lot of noise in the image. I discussed this in the last PMP. So to fix this, I ran Noiseware at a low setting to reduce the grain that now appeared when you viewed the photo at 100%.

Step 5: Levels Adjustment

 

After running Noiseware, the first thing I did was to adjust the levels using a levels adjustment layer. If you look at the histogram above, you see that there was almost nothing on the far left (blacks/shadows), so I moved the black slider to where the histogram data started on the left (indicated by the blue arrow). This then made Kaia a little too dark, so I adjusted the midtone (middle) slider toward the darks (indicated with the red arrow), thus giving more room to the light side of the histogram (the right). We were looking better already!

Step 6: Brighten/lighten with Curves

I still felt that her face was not bright enough. So I added a curves adjustment layer and selected a point on her forehead to be the reference point for brightening. I pulled up the point slightly, but didn’t like what this did to the grass. So I ended up inverting the mask (making it black) and using a soft white brush to paint in the brighter area on her skin.

Step 7: Skin Color Correction

I’ll be the first to admit that skin color correction drives me mad. But if we look at the CYMK numbers from the spot on her forehead above, you will see that her cyan is 31%, magenta is 34% and yellow is 41%. That is not an ideal ratio. Yellow should be highest, and magenta less than yellow, but the cyan should be 1/4 to 1/3 of yellow’s value. As you can see we were way off.

I added a color balance layer and added more red to the midtones and highlights to get the cyan down. But I would have had to truly dial up the red in order to get the cyan down to 1/3 of the yellow. This led to a judgment call. I opted to settle for cyan being 1/2 of yellow rather than making Kaia the incredibly red girl.

We ended up with a cyan of 16%, magenta of 28% and yellow of 31%. And now she looks more alive! But the skin color correction did something very odd to the grass, so I masked that back with a black brush.

Step 8: Color Pop

One of the most fun tools you can use to give your image a little pop is to duplicate the background layer (or just use an unadjusted curves or levels layer) and set the blend mode to overlay, soft light or hard light. Overlay adds contrast, darkens your darks and lightens your lights. Soft light is a softer adjustment than overlay.

Above I wanted to show you where we started after color correction, and then after adding an overlay blend mode layer. As you can see, the overlay layer at 100% opacity is too, too, much! She looks neon colored. But when we pull the opacity down to 45% we get something more reasonable. So don’t let the 100% image scare you. You can adjust for as much or as little pop as you would like.

I find, however, that when editing young kids, I prefer the soft light blend mode to the overlay blend mode.

Above I added a curves layer and set it to soft light blend mode. I left the opacity pretty high at 80% because soft light isn’t as dramatic as overlay can be. I also used a technique to get rid of the yellow patches in the shadows (neck, chin). And now we are looking pretty darn good!

Step 9: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain!

The last bit of editing is slightly more advanced, but it took us a little beyond where we landed after the color pop. I brightened and sharpened her eyes a teensy bit and then also got rid of that dark blob above her head that was distracting. I removed a couple of facial ditzels and then sharpened for web. Sharpening always improves how your image appears on the web. It adds a hint of crispness.

Eh voila:

Pretty glorious, right? It even made a lovely black and white image too:

There you have it. Kaia’s picture is all pimped out!

This may all be a lot to take in, but feel free to pepper me with questions about anything I did in editing this image. And if you are interested in submitting your photo for Pimp My Pic, just send me an e-mail!

Anatomy of A Family Photo Shoot

Posted on December 25, 2011

Hi Friends,

So here’s the question for the day: how many photos does it take to get the ideal Clark-Schecter holiday card picture? Now before you answer remember that this involves my being in front of the camera and not behind it. That added a degree of difficulty of about 200%.

What do you think?

If you chose any option other than the last choice, well, you must be one of those optimists!

Our first foray was on December 4th. I was going for a sun-going-down, golden hour look. It was unseasonably warm and the kid was cooperating. Honestly after that shoot, I thought I had nailed it then and there. Got some great shots. Rocked the backlighting. Of course when we had started, I had forgotten to tell Mason to take off his damn Transitions glasses! Those things have plagued me for years. I’ve spent way too long in previous years attempting to restore visible eyes behind those sun-darkened lenses.

But that notwithstanding, I was able to find some goodies. I then posted the ones I was considering for the card on Clickin Moms to get some feedback.

So I’m thinking to myself, these both look pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though I prefer the second one to the first because of Zara’s expression, I think the softness in our features from the backlighting might make it the weaker choice.

And then the feedback started to come in.

“Gorgeous shot, but that tree is too distracting,” one commenter said. From another: “I agree with the previous poster. Wish you had positioned yourselves differently.”

And I’m thinking to myself, OMG, there is a tree growing out of our heads. Am I mental? How did I not see that?!

The truth is that I had seen the tree but ended up at a loss about how to position us in relation to that tree. Somehow I thought that if there were three of us, it wouldn’t look as if the tree were growing out of all of our heads. But there is it, up close and personal. The tree IS growing out of our heads!

Other commenters attempted to assure me that those I would send the card to would not be nearly as distracted by the tree as we photogs are. Of course, by that point, I could see nothing in the photo BUT the tree! I decided to reshoot.

Unfortunately Saturday the 10th was nothing like Sunday the 4th. It was about 20 degrees colder and the ground was wet and mucky. The kid was cold and uncooperative and the hubby was surly because she was cold and he felt that I hadn’t dressed her warmly enough. I ended up rushing the shoot despite doing all I could to keep her in the warm car between set-ups. I then made the mistake of asking her to smile showing her teeth. She’d never had any problem with that in the past, but after getting back to my computer and uploading the images, I found that my kid must have decided that she was a beaver! I saw some of the most silly faces she has ever made.

I was so sad that night. What kind of photographer did I hope to be if I couldn’t even get a photo of my own family?! So my dear, supportive husband made me get right back in the saddle. The next day, he insisted in going out and doing it all over again. He’d dress Z in more layers and he would stop breathing down my neck in order to allow me to relax and do my thing. Of course Z ended up in one of her oppositional defiant modes again, but a total of 417 shots later, we had some good photos that didn’t have trees growing out of our heads!

Here are some of the outtakes:

 

Note the wonderful Transition lenses in these:

Yes, this still has the tree, but I love this shot!

So which photos made it to the card?

Front:

Inside top:

Inside bottom, flanking holiday message:

Not so bad, despite all that work, right? I’m going to use these to make a canvas wall photo collection for the house.

But I do have to show you guys the beauty of digital editing, though. Now you all know that I’m massively huge these days thanks for my steroids. Even though I’m in a feel good about myself because fat is better than dead place, I still shuddered a bit at how round both Mason and I looked in these images. I opted to use a can-be-used-for-good-or-for-evil editing tool called liquify. Using this PS tool, I managed to give us a bit of a digital diet in some of the photos:

Before is on top and after below. We lost a good 20 pounds with the use of technology! Mason wanted me to go even further, but no. These tools cannot be used to suspend all connection with reality!

So there you have it, my friends. The fun of a family photo shoot when you are both photog and subject!

Hope your holiday was wonderful! Best to you in the new year!

Pimp My Pic #1

Posted on July 2, 2011

This is what I hope to be the first of a new feature here on the EJP photoblog: a step by step tutorial of how I can take your good shot and make it fabulous with the wonders of Photoshop. (Please note that the steps I’m using here can also be done in Photoshop Elements.)

Our Facebook fan, Sheila Hardie, submitted some great shots of her daughter for me to use for this tutorial. My goal for this tutorial was to use a really good shot that didn’t need a Hail Mary of repair work to save it. Instead I hope to show you how a few tweaks can give your SOOC (straight out of the camera) shot more pizzazz.

Of the ones that Sheila sent, I chose this photo to work with because I loved the composition with the leading lines. I also love the innocent expression on her daughter’s face.

Straight out of the camera (SOOC) this is a nice shot. It is a tad underexposed, but overall it is great for our purposes here.

The first thing I did was to bring it into Camera Raw. This is the interface with Photoshop that allows you to make some basic tweaks.

For now let’s ignore the red blinkies in the hat for the moment. The first thing we want to do here is to correct the photo’s white balance. Since light has different temperatures, if your camera’s automatic settings for capturing the light temperature are off, the white balance will be off. Things that are supposed to look white aren’t and colors tend to be less like what you saw with your eyes.

In this next screenshot, I’ve used the white balance tool (circled) to pick a point in the photo that is most neutral/near a 12% gray. Clicking here changed the temperature of the light. You can see the subtle but real difference after this change.

The color was changed just a fraction. I was tempted to use the white part of the hat as a place to measure but the result was way too yellow. And I thought the stairs might be good, but I see now that they aren’t gray marble. The tone is yellowish, so that would have thrown things off as well.

I then raised the exposure a half stop to brighten the underexposure.

This moved our histogram to the right a bit (you can see the histogram in the top right part of the screenshot) and the circled area got clipped (meaning the pixels are brighter than what can be registered by the camera). We want to avoid clipping if possible, but in this case we needed to brighten the photo. To correct the clipping, we will use the recovery slider. This slider helps bring the clipped highlights (red in the photo) back into a normal range.

The red blinkies are gone and our histogram looks a little better.

Now it is time to open the image in Photoshop.

When I open a photo into Photoshop, especially with an underexposed photo such as this, I always zoom to 100% so that I can see what the picture looks like up close and personal. Here we can see that as is common with underexposure, there is a lot of grain/noise to the photo. It can look great when looked at from a distance, but up close or with more enlargement, we see this noise that results from our brightening.

So what do we do about it? Well my preference is to use a noise reduction program. I use Noiseware, one of the best there are out there. Here’s a screenshot of Noiseware’s before and after processing of this photo:

It can’t make it perfect, but it helps it an awful lot, right?

Now we still see the photo is underexposed a bit. So we’re going to do a little trick to brighten it. The first thing I do is to make a copy of the background layer. I’ll change the name of this copy to “lightening layer.” And this is where we will use some of the blending modes that you see in the layers panel in the lower right of the screenshot. I’m choosing the one called “Screen.” Screen blend mode helps lighten shadows. At 100% it was too much, but I lowered it to 50% and this is the result:

The exposure looks much better, but the photo lacks oomph…otherwise known as contrast. So I add this by using a levels adjustment layer:

I moved the left slider in the histogram at the right toward where the pixels actually start. (The slider was all the way at the left on 0 and I moved it to about 45. See the arrow.) This helped balance the photo and gave it more contrast.

The last thing I did was all about more presence. I used a funky filter called the high pass filter:

When you go to use this filter, it will look a little scary, like this:

The goal is to adjust the radius enough to give the image a little more 3D quality. Now the best guidance I was given for selecting one’s radius is to start at 0 and increase the radius until you start to see colors come through in the photo. I’ve never asked why that point is the best, but I’ve continued to use that guidance. And in the screenshot above, you can just start to see the orange dots in the hat starting to show their color. I stopped there.

When you use this filter, you have to select a blend mode for blending it to the layer below. I went back and forth between overlay and soft light…both of these blend modes lighten your lights and darken your darks thus giving the photo more presence, yet soft light is more subtle than overlay. I went with soft light.

So with these few tweaks, we went from this:

To this:

I like it. The change isn’t drastic. It’s just got a bit more oomph. What do you think, Sheila?

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If anything was too technical or you need more information about any of the steps, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.

Thanks for reading Pimp My Pic #1!