[Netfound] Lesson 2

[Netfound] Lesson 2


OK - I hope you've been following along with the mats, rather than just watching me. It makes a BIG difference in your learning curve if you work the fake with me.

I'd like everyone who thinks they may benefit from this to download the mats from Lesson 1 and follow along...


OK - this is where we left off:


Basically, we've got the HS and BS in the same file, and we've done a very quick and dirty blending to get us in the ballpark...


PLAN OF ATTACK
The next step, I believe, should be the tonal range and color correction. You approach different fakes in different ways - but for this one, the colors are so far off, that I think we need to get them in the ballpark, like we did with the blending, so we can really begin to see the fake take shape.

Generally, I start with the Tonal Range, because if that is off, you can play with the colors all day and not get a match. Then once I have that, I hit the color....I start with the roughest, biggest adjustments first, then refine things as I go.

The fact that the color differences in our working fake are so great also gives me a chance to use more than one tool, illustrating different ways you can work color-correction on your own fakes....


LEVELS - Tonal Range
Levels is the tool that we will use to work on the Tonal Range of our image. If you are unfamiliar with Levels, or would like a little more information about what all those sliders do, then please visit my Levels Basics tutorial.

Looking at our fake, I see that not only is the HS much lighter than our BS, but it has brighter highlights as well. I usually do not advocate bringing the outer sliders of the levels into the 'information area' too much, but in this case it was helpful. As long as you aren't pushing visible areas of the image to pure white, you are OK. Be careful - watch your images closely when using Levels or any other adjustment tool....not just the areas you are targeting, but the entire image!

These are my adjustments:


As you can see, I brought in the right slider to kick up the highlights a bit, and moved the middle (or Gamma) slider to the left to lighten the image. This is just something you have to eye - to get things as close as possible. In this case, the HS and BS are so far apart that I want to meet in the middle somewhere....otherwise things might end up looking over-manipulated, and we want to avoid that.


Levels - Color Correction
OK - now that the tonal range is closer, we can take a look at our colors. Since this fake has such a color difference between HS and BS, I want to use Levels to do the bulk adjustment, then I'll go in with Selective Color later to make finer adjustments.

To see what we need to do, we need to look at the individual channels. Go to your Channels palette and take a look at the Red, Green, and Blue channels. What I'm seeing is that the BS in the Red channel is lighter than the HS. The Green channel is pretty close. And the BS in the Blue channel is much darker

 TIP
The darker Blue channel is what is giving the BS the overwhelming yellow color. Each color affects its opposite. Add blue and you remove yellow. Add cyan and you reduce the reds. Add green and you reduce the magentas....and vice versa on all of those. This is important knowledge to have when making color adjustments!

Now that we have a rough idea of what we have to do (darken the reds, lighten the blues), go back to the Layers palette and add a second Levels adjustment layer on top of the first.

This time, instead of affecting the entire image, we want individual control of the channels. So use the pull down at the top of the Levels dialog box to select the Reds. Use the middle slider only. I slid mine to the right a bit, then switched to the Blue channel and slid the middle slider to the left a bit. I went back and forth until I got a more natural looking skin color. It is closer to the HS now, but not a perfect match - that's OK because we're meeting in the middle. The important thing is that we have a realistic skin tone - we've killed that enormous yellow color cast.

My final numbers, for those following along, were .63 for the Red and 1.25 for the Blue. That's the center number of the "Input Levels" just above the histogram - we adjusted the middle sliders only.


ADJUSTING THE HS
OK - now that we've got a reasonable skin tone for the BS, it's time to see if we can make the HS match.

The first thing I noticed was that the HS lacked color - the saturation was low. So to give myself a little something to work with, I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to the HS and upped the saturation +8. Click OK and you're done with that one.

 TIP
Adjustment layers affect everything below them. This wasn't a big deal when we were working on the BS because it was at the bottom of the Layer stack. But now that we are working on the HS, we need to make sure that our adjustment layers affect the HS only. We do this by linking the adjustment layers to the HS.

One way to do this is by holding down the ALT key while clicking the "New Adjustment Layer" icon at the bottom of the stack. That way we get a dialog box with options, one of which is a checkbox we can check that says "Use Previous Layer as Clipping Mask" in Photoshop CS2, and something like "Group with Previous Layer" or something similar in previous versions.

If you've already created the layer, then you can do it directly at the Layer stack. Hold down the ALT key and move your mouse to the line between the HS layer and the Hue/Sat layer. The mouse pointer will change when you are over the line - click and the Hue/Sat will be linked to the layer below.

OK - now is the time to bring in your new best friend - Selective Color. Add a selective color layer above the Hue/Sat layer....linked like the Hue/Sat layer.

Selective Color is a terrific tool - a little intimidating at first, but very flexible and very powerful. It allows you to adjust the color balance within a certain range of colors. Like this:

When you first load Selective Color, the drop down up top will be at the Reds. That means that any adjustment that you make will affect the red areas of the image. Areas that have little red in them will not be affected much or at all. If you raise the yellows - Selective Colors will add yellow to the image - but only in the red areas!

This allows us to make very specific color changes to our images - and fine color adjustment is vitally important in faking.

Let's look at our fake. I see a huge lack of yellows in the HS - so bump up the yellows - I raised mine to +38. The HS looks a touch green-ish, but there's no Green adjustment. But remember our color theory from above - raise magentas and you lower the greens. I bumped Magenta up +6.

The HS needs to be a bit more red as well - and Cyan is the opposite of Red. So I dropped Cyan -41 to bring out more red in the image.

I didn't pull these numbers out of thin air - I just moved the sliders around a bit, going back and forth between the different adjustments, until I got it to where it looked about right.

So far we've only been affecting the Reds - and there's yellows in the face as well, so use the drop down up top to change to yellows. I added red again by lowering cyan... -22. I bumped up magenta again a touch...+3. And I added a bit more yellow again, bumping yellow up +12.

Again - I got these numbers by experimenting. I went back and forth between the Reds and Yellows as well a little bit, making these adjustments.

Her face is pretty good now, and the hair is getting very close!

I'm going to stop right here - we'll continue fine-tuning our color match next lesson. This is where I'm at right now.....what does yours look like?