help?

Tangerini · Feb 28, 2007

So the white balance is obviously off... and my little one jumped in :lol:

can anyone help me with this ? All I end up doing is fighting with photoshop...
please let me know what you did too

I really want to learn!

This is the orgininal (not cropped at all)

mr e · Feb 28, 2007

What do you want done? Just fix the white balance? Or what?

It might be too blown out to get it looking right regardless of what's done with it, but I'll still see if I can fix the yellow tint for you.

Ah, well, maybe it's not *too* blown out, here's what I got

What I did
I first copied the base layer to a new layer, then on the new layer I used the magic wand to get rid of most of the white background, did the best job I could, wasn't perfect though (especially around the hair)

Then I believe I did auto levels (usually gets you pretty close), then opened up the levels tool and manually (I think) altered the blue to counter out the yellow tint (I played with the red, blue, and green levels till I got a normal human look)

Then I upped the contrast a bit (not sure how much, again, until it didn't look so washed out)

At this point, especially around the hair, there was a blueish tint where the blue was over the white(the background is still the original picture) because I wasn't gonna select each individual hair to fix it

So what I did is apply a layer mask and paint out some of the blue (if you need more specificity just let me know), but what I'm doing is basically making parts of my recolored layer transparent (a mask is white/gray/black, white = opaque, black = transparent), so if I paint too much of the layer mask black the bright yellow will start to show through, so I painted a bit black, and some gray, enough to hide the blue, but not let the bright yellow hair show through, although if you look at the tips of the hair, they're the original bright yellow, but usually you can't tell if you're not looking for it.

And that's for the most part what I did, and like I said, if you need anything clarified let me know, it's not too hard of a process once you get to know photoshop, although it does take a good while of messing with it to really figure at least some of it out.

Tangerini · Feb 28, 2007

I'm not looking for any detail in the background.... Pretty much just the white balance, but also crop? Hrm... I'm thinking I'm gonna reshoot.

mr e · Feb 28, 2007

Haha, sorry I was in the middle of editing my post when you posted, probably should've just made a new post, but oh well

And yeah, reshooting without blowing out the background would probably be your best bet

Tangerini · Feb 28, 2007

Thank you! Your explaination and result are great! Now I'm going to have to try it out and see how close I can get

j_mcquillen · Mar 1, 2007

Just a bit of an experiment with a more exteme crop...

Cropped the image first, then adjusted levels to brighten the background, and cloned out the remains of the curtain.

Adjusted colour balance and hue/saturation.

Duplicated the original layer, then added a fairly heavy 'gaussian blur', and increased the colour saturation, before turning the opacity of this edited layer right down to about 20-25% and then flattening - this created a slightly soft focus effect.

Added a touch of 'diffuse glow' from the 'distort' menu - this increased the high-key lighting effect.

Finally added a border by using 'edit/stroke', and then increasing the canvas size.

Hope you like it!