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Tom Mann - man you are true magician. The only thing that bothers me is the purple in her hair, she does not have it in the other photo and it definitely comes from the fluorescent light as you described.
Thanks for pointing that out, Pete! That's always the danger of sending an image off before you sleep on it -- one is so concentrating on fixing other aspects of the image, they miss something obvious like the hair -- just like I did, LOL.
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Tom Mann - you're awsome, but I'm not understand how you do it. could you walk me through it ???
Hi Marc - As you can probably guess from my comments and those of some of the other participants in the thread, fixing this image in PS was far from simple. I probably had a dozen saved masks / selections, and easily at least 2 or 3 dozen different adjustment layers. In
your "Hello" posting, you mentioned that you were a beginner in Photoshop, so I don't feel it would be a good idea for you to use the method I used on this image to learn from. Instead, I would suggest starting the process of learning PS with a much simpler task. For example, Peta62 correctly pointed out that I left the girl's hair a bit purple. Why don't you try to fix that one specific problem, post what you have done, and we'll go from there.
With respect to the exact method I used, here's a quick summary. Like everyone else probably did, I started by simply trying tools such as the "levels", "curves" and "exposure" adjustment layers. I also tried to use ACR by itself. After a few seconds playing around like this, I quickly realized that the fundamental problem was not the quantity of the light, or even the color, but the quality, ie, in what direction was it coming from, what was I going to do with the unwanted shadows that the fluorescent lights cast, pulling deeply shadowed areas out of the mud without introducing lots of noise, etc. This realization led me to the method I described in
my earlier post:
"... the only way you are going to come close in post processing is by picking apart the image, area by area and applying separate color and tonal corrections (including dodging and burning) to each area, particularly, the face. ..."
In other words, I started by constructing and saving layer masks for each of the different areas in the image, e.g., each of the books, the newspaper background, the face, the hair, etc., and, for convenience, various combinations of the preceding areas, and variants of the previous with one of the edges blurred to provide a smooth transition to an adjacent area. Then, based on my experience with PS, I selected a set of appropriate tools, typically, at least the following adjustment layers, "curves", "hue/saturation", "selective color", put them in a group, put the appropriate layer mask on the group, and started adjusting the areas, one-by-one. In addition, for some areas, I needed to adjust the shadows and highlights separately, so I either used the "dodge" and "burn" tools, or used the "BlendIF" sliders on particular adjustment layers to selectively target either the shadows or the highlights. Obviously, one needs a well-developed "eye" and lots of previous experience with these tools so that one doesn't wind up with something that looks like a patchwork quilt or the photographic equivalent of a ransom note, LOL.
This is what I consider a brute-force approach to improving an image like this. I don't like having to work this way, but in tough cases, it gets the job done. This is why I wouldn't recommend that you use this image (as a whole) for any beginner to start to learn PS.
HTH,
Tom M
but it's part of an album so....
