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The Auto Color adjustment in Photoshop, or any other program, just
will not be able to handle this sort of image. I did not find it easy and
spent an hour going around in circles before I began to twig how to be able to
get somewhere.
| There is nothing in this image that we know could be
Neutral, but there is a Shadow point and I assumed that the checked shirt
had white-ish squares - so at least we could adjust the contrast range without
loosing anything. The face is the obvious area to concentration on and by using Hue Clock
monitor points and being able to enlarge the curve dialogs, one could begin
to alter the rgb channels to get somewhere near flesh tones. I
thought I'd try for a fairly dull skin, but keeping the Hue clock around
12.30 to 1.
The actual curve values on this first pass, were
Red: 80,0 124,28 156,60 182,100 243,255
Green: 33,0 55,33 77,66 100,99 159,174 161,176 238,255
Blue: 3,0 34,49 60,89 79,116 143,162 183,217 209,255
- that's 19 control points (some just to hold the curve straight), as shown below with the 'before'
image at the bottom |

click on it to get the original 200K image if you want to play!
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This had removed most of the cast, but also de-saturated the image quite a bit.
I do each CurveMeister change and for that matter, most other changes, on a new Layer, so I added a new CurveMeister layer for my second pass to add back a little colour and increase the contrast.
This time I used LAB (much the best for colour) and came up with these curves
Lightness: 0,0 44,28 73,70 100,100
a: -51,-128 -4,-4 5,17 18,51 50,127
b: -51,-128 -1,-2 11,14 23,28 26,43 50,127
- another 15 control points!
It is a bit too red, but better than the 1st pass, which I've included in the bottom of the snapshot.
I find Lab much easier to curve in as Luminosity and Colour are separated -
and (not being a woman) I can only manage one thing at a time! So I normally concentrate on one of them before tackling t'other.
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| We are getting towards the end, but if you look
a close-up view, there is an awful lot of noise and artefact
colours. The right image below is after I have applied a 5 pixel
Guassian blur to the a and b channels - which necessitated
me changing the Photoshop image mode to Lab. I would have
liked a larger blur, but that would have washed out colours from the shirt
etc. |
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| While I had the image in Lab mode I ran my Lab
Saturation Action and reduced
the Opacity of the layer to 50% and I then thought a touch more contrast
would help, so I applied this final simple curve. |
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| I just wanted a touch more depth to the image,
so I applied the MistyBlur Action (as on my Action page) at 30% Opacity to
give it some body - probably too much! |
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The final skin colour is perhaps a touch too red and you will notice, if
you flip back to the top of the page, that the sofa wrap colours are completely
different - I wonder if they are correct!
What did I learn from this? - that having Hue Clocks and being able to
have each channel curve window as big as I wanted allowed me to manage very fine
adjustments that would have been absolutely impossible in Photoshop. I
could concentrate on different parts of the image, one at a time, in an attempt
to adjust it. The other nice feature of CM is that it remembers your
curves, so assuming you did them on new layers, you can go back in, pick up
where you last left off and tweak them.
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