This time last semester I was sad my classes were ending. This semester the story's different; I can't wait for one of them to end. Some advice: be sure to devote an entire semester to a Photoshop-intensive class, there's just too much to learn and practice.With that said, it's been awhile since I posted my recent work. At the end of last semester, you might remember the book cover I created for Livewire. One of the photos had a distinct reddish cast. For a Retouch assignment, I chose that picture along with two others taken less than seconds a part.
As all images suffer the same color issue (I decided to correct them in batch in Camera Raw – something I didn’t know I could do until I took this class), I selected them all in Bridge and opened them in Camera Raw 4. The first change I made was selecting Tungsten for white balance. The images were taken in low light so I employed Recovery (from 0 to 22), Fill Light (from 0 to 30) and Blacks (from 5 to 21) to recapture details that might have been lost in the shadows. As the images were taken with ISO 1250 I changed Luminance from 0 to 29. I also set Fix Red/Cyan Fringe to +8.
The first of a series of three images was previously the image I’d chosen to use as both singers were in focus. In this image I chose to take Rich (guitarist on the left) and Rachel (singer on the right) and add them to the second image. I also added Thomas (male singer on the right) from the third image to the second image.
I used Unsharp Mask selectively to enhance some of the band member’s faces – Angie (singer on the left), Rachel (singer on the right) and Thomas (male singer). To the overall image I applied a Hue/Saturation adjustment of Hue -41, Saturation of -56 to bring back some of the details in the blown out highlights. I then applied a Black/White adjustment with Reds -18%, Yellows -141%, Magentas 101%. I left Greens, Cyans, and Blues alone. I selected Tint to give the image a softer “sepia-style” coloring.
Once I had the image to a state I liked overall, I flattened it so that I could use Clone Stamp and the Healing Brush to correct edges of the framed photos.
