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[OM] Re: Portrait PP, Objective, or Subjective

Subject: [OM] Re: Portrait PP, Objective, or Subjective
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:25:57 -0700
Bob Whitmire wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2008, at 5:24 AM, Moose wrote:
>   
>> If this was shot RAW, playing with the color temp slider in the converter 
>> will do a better, subtler job of adjustment than the filter or whatever 
>> effect the Pbase person used.
>>     
>
> Okay, I'm going to let my ignorance hang way, way out here. But if I use the 
> tem slider in CS3 on the RAW file, it will yellow her hair, too. And because 
> everything is global in Camera Raw, how would I then get back to the silver 
> hair? Another exposure, combined, with the hair from one and the skin tones 
> from the other?
>   
Perhaps I was too brief, and thus unclear. I propose that there are two 
relatively separate steps here.

The first is correction for the cool light. She may indeed look in your 
version as she did in that light. But how does she look outside on a 
sunny, summer day? If the answer is, warmer, then the first step is 
about correcting for the overly cool light. That correction would apply 
to everything, including the hair, and should be relatively subtle, so 
the hair won't go funny looking. And it's just what the temp. slider in 
ACR is for.

The second step is essentially cosmetic. As Andrew said, "It's about 
making people look the same way on the print as they do in their heads." 
Here's where more complexion warming, skin smoothing, and so on, go.

There are seemingly endless ways to do the warming. I tend to look first 
at what a warming filter does. They are, oddly enough, under 
Image=>Adjust=>Photo Filter, rather than the more logical location under 
Filter. They usually work nicely for things other than human skin - and 
sometimes for that, too.

The workflow Bill suggests for softening is used in the same way  for 
color. Create a separate layer and do the color adjustments. Then play 
with layer opacity a little to see if less is more, as it so often is 
for me. Then I diverge from him.

"...  I  will then take my eraser tool and erase the ...."

That's the sort of thing I used to do, while ignoring the folks talking about 
those mysterious "layer masks". Well, I was wrong. Layer masks are magic, even 
at my relatively low level of understanding all they can do.

In this simple example, instead of erasing, you click on the little shaded box 
with the clear circle in it at the bottom of the layer palette. This creates a 
second, white thumbnail of the warmer layer image next to the one of the layer 
image in the palette. When this is selected, painting with black has exactly he 
same visual effect as using the eraser. The difference is that instead of being 
gone, the "erased" parts are only masked, and may be brought back, either 
partially or fully, by painting with white.

You can also use intermediate tones for partial effects and set the opacity and 
flow of the brush. The ability to work tricky edges from both sides with 
different brush settings makes subtle transitions much easier and, at least for 
me, better than I was able to achieve with the eraser.

The other big advantage is that the mask may be altered further at any time, 
even after other things have been done. With the eraser, if I had done other 
adjustments and later found I'd erased where I shouldn't have, I'd have to 
backtrack. 

The one masking function for which layer masks don't work for me is in blurring 
backgrounds, but that's another story.

Moose



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