How to remove shadows in post processing?

[juliensart]

;

[Shadowman]

Used Portrait Professional, went a bit over board with the enhancements.

[Colin Southern]

Used Portrait Professional, went a bit over board with the enhancements.

John,

Hate to say this buddy, but those skin tones looks like she's been involved in a tanning shop explosion

[Ryogenetic]

So to reduce the shadows from this:



To this:



Granted I am using CS5 but I will attempt to lay the process out so that you can follow in any editor that has layers and masks. (eg. GIMP, Paint.net) Normal workflow of setting levels. Than my first step was to identify the shadows that I wanted to remove. (Right side of the face from above the right eyebrow, across the iris, down the side of the cheek, swooping back up to the nose and back down to the corner of the mouth, to the side of the chin and the whole neck) I copied the original image to a new layer and used a selection tool to select the area described. I then added a layer mask, inverted the selection, and filled with Black to allow the original image to show thru. Took the copied layer and adjusted the brightness and contrast till it was the same as the rest of the image. (This leaves a line unless you have feathered the Mask) To remove the lines on the face I cloned out the line bit by bit. Next was to sharpen the image slightly. Then I copied the original layer again and selected just the subject, lowered the vib and saturation of the background.

Hope that makes sense.
Ryo

[jcuknz]

What I would like to see and nobody has done it yet is to preserve the rich highlight areas while reducing considerably the darkness in the shadow areas. The higfhlight areas are almost approaching burn out in most examples. I doubt if it can be done and as I said earlier I quite like the multi shadow original ... the subject outweighs technique.

[Shadowman]

John,

Hate to say this buddy, but those skin tones looks like she's been involved in a tanning shop explosion

I hear some will pay for this procedure, only once though.

[Clactonian]

One could play for hours in Lightroom making finite adjustments but as I think has already been proved, the complex shadows are far too difficult to overcome without changing the features on that beautiful face.
My preference would be to enhance those features to catch the viewers eye, thereby reducing the effect of the shadows somewhat.
Something like this ....

[juliensart]

I always work with two layers: one with the last result and one to work on.
The new result becomes the new first layer for further adjustments.

[wobert]

Reg, Hi, You did set us a difficult problem with this one. Shadows are always hard to reduce. You have had great advice from others.
For my "two bits worth" my adjustments (in Photoshop CS5) were-
Work on a duplicate layer.
Apply a gaussian blur to the duplicate layer.
Add a mask and Brush on the mask to only blur where the shadow edges occur.
Add some noise with the "noise" filter to restore a bit of texture to the blurred areas.
(and lightened the eyes with a levels adjustment on the selected eyes only)
I dont know if Gimp can do something similar.- but Keep trying! that's the fun of it.

[Deucalion]

Hi Juliensart, Robert

(Juliensart) would you mind detailing how you processed the image, I have a copy of Gimp but a friend of mind has also provided me with a copy of Photoshop portable, I would very much like to be able to replicate what you've done.

(Robert) thank you for your efforts, in fact... I think you've come close to what I want done, by reducing much of the shadows on her face without changing much of what I like about the image, one thing tho, you said you've lightened the eyes with a level adjustment, how do u add a catchlight (?is that the correct term?) effect to her eyes?

I think what I want is somewhere between what both Juliensart and Robert have done to post process the image, wow so many people working to make my image a better one...thank you all for your efforts

[Loose Canon]

Hi Reginald!

Been kind of busy the last few days! Sorry I'm late to the party!

Hope you don't mind, but I had a little time and thought I'd toss out still yet another version into the mix!

[Dave Humphries]

Very nice Terry

[Loose Canon]

Thank you Dave.

[wobert]

Very nice Terry,
With a bit of sharpening makes it 'pop' even more! What else have you done?
Reg- as for your question-"one thing tho, you said you've lightened the eyes with a level adjustment, how do u add a catchlight (?is that the correct term?) effect to her eyes?
I very simple made a 'lasso' oval selection around both eyes with some feathering, then applied a "Levels" adjustment (move the centre slider triangle of the levels histogram) which just has the effect of changing exposure only about the eyes.
Feathering the selection avoids a harsh line that would look very obvious. You can even do similar to select one colour in the levels adjustment to brighten the colour of the iris. Even zoom in and use a small dodge tool to "whiten" the whites of the eyes.- Lots of possibilities. If you want a 'highlight' you can even paint a white spot in the same place of each iris that looks like a reflected light source- have you ever seen umbrella reflectors visible in the eyes of fashion models?
I suggested working on a duplicate layer of the image as that always gives me a way of un-doing my adjustments later if desired.
Keep on at it- practice makes perfect!

[pat3pee]

I also had to try my hand at this shadow difficulty. Think I got rid of most of the shadows but the colours aren't too good. Like Robert's rendition though.
Cheers / Patrik

[Loose Canon]

Reg- as for your question-"one thing tho, you said you've lightened the eyes with a level adjustment, how do u add a catchlight (?is that the correct term?) effect to her eyes?
I very simple made a 'lasso' oval selection around both eyes with some feathering, then applied a "Levels" adjustment (move the centre slider triangle of the levels histogram) which just has the effect of changing exposure only about the eyes.

and...

If you want a 'highlight' you can even paint a white spot in the same place of each iris that looks like a reflected light source- have you ever seen umbrella reflectors visible in the eyes of fashion models?

Just to avoid confusion, of these two statements, the latter "highlight" statement is the statement that refers to what is the actual "catchlight" in the eyes. The catchlight is a spectral highlight artifact usually (but not always) caused by the lighting. As in the example of the "umbrella reflectors visible in the eyes...". It gives a "sparkle" to the eyes.

This artifact was not present in the eyes of Reginald's original posted photograph.

[Jeff S]

I took a slightly different approach. Using the Lasso Tool, I surrounded the shadow on her upper lip and chin, then went to the "refine edge" button and added 2 pixel's worth of "feather" and clicked "OK". Back in PS CS6 I used the Curves tool to lighten the shadow until it roughly matched the lighter skin on her chin. I finished it off by alternating between the spot healing brush and the clone stamp to clean up any remaining spots, using the fade selection under the edit tab after each small healing or clone to match the surrounding skin. This didn't take me very long because the curves tool in combination with the Lasso Tool did most of the heavy lifting.

I only did this around her mouth, but I think the same process would work on any dark area that you wanted to lighten.

[Jeff S]

I decided to go back and finish other skin areas just to check if my approach worked with the rest of her face. I used the Quick Selection Tool rather than the Lasso Tool this time, in order to capture the shadow areas I wanted to lighten, but otherwise I just did the same thing as my previous post mentioned. It's really important to do this in stages, with frequent resort to the fade selection in order to keep from over doing the curves adjustment, spot healing and cloning. I also used the blur tool the same way with one stubborn spot that I couldn't seem to manage.

By using this approach I didn't alter the skin tones from the original image. Her skin tones do seem a bit orange to me, and I'd be tempted to alter those a bit (unless the color is faithful to her actual skin under the existing lights). However, that is beyond the scope of your question, so I left skin tones as a whole just as your image captured them.

[pasusan]

As a total newbie to PP (have only used an old version of Paint Shop Pro for many years) this thread has been very instructive.

To compare the pictures, I copied the ones I liked as well as the original into PSP and could look at them side by side. What I find interesting and I'm wondering if someone can explain is why when I zoom in on the original the pixels don't start blurring as quickly as the PP'd versions. I do see that this last one by Jeff S is much better in that regard. And again, why? Does it have something to do with layers (which I need to learn about)?

Lots to learn here - am so glad I found this site!

[Jeff S]

@ Pasusan:

I haven't taken the time to check each image posted in this thread, but the ones I checked were 72 pixels/inch, whereas mine happened to be 240 pixels/inch. 72 is plenty for the internet. 240 is more likely to be used when printing an image. I just happened to have the photo set on the higher number (which wasn't needed for this application) but contains more data so it does not break down as fast when zooming in to look at it. Normally, I would have used 72 pixels/inch in this thread. I just didn't happen to notice when posting.

If it is anything more than that, I don't know why.