How To Remove The Reddish Glow?

[ilovelucydog]

This is an old picture that I opened to work on. I had to clone and crop quite a bit. It was taken at night with poor lighting, and there is quite a bit of noise. I'm okay with that, since I am wanting to edit it in CS5 to have more of a painted look. I've done one copy and it turned out okay, but the reddish glow on Max's arm (playing the accoustic guitar) stands out quite a bit. Any suggestions on how to reduce that?

[jeeperman]

Hi Mary, You could try useing the red channel in curves. I just tried a quicky and was able to reduce it significantly. Still learning proper PP myself I am not sure this is the correct or most efficient way but it worked. It did darken things slightly but I am sure with a little tweaking that is fixable. =}

Rather than completely removing the red, reducing slightly may be all you need as it looks to be caused by a red stage light?

[ilovelucydog]

Hi Mary, You could try useing the red channel in curves. I just tried a quicky and was able to reduce it significantly. Still learning proper PP myself I am not sure this is the correct or most efficient way but it worked. It did darken things slightly but I am sure with a little tweaking that is fixable. =}

Rather than completely removing the red, reducing slightly may be all you need as it looks to be caused by a red stage light?

Thanks, Paul. I will give that a shot. I haven't worked a whole with the specific channels... lots to learn. Yes, the red is from stage lighting. Thanks.

[jeeperman]

Mary, here is my quick go. All that was done here is....in curves I lessend the red in the red channel and then brought back a little of the light lost in the same curves with the value channel. You could go more or less either way, but this should give you an idea.

[ilovelucydog]

Thanks. I'll fiddle with it some more tomorrow. When you read about or watch tutorials, on CS5 (what I use) it doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult. Then, I sit down, open something up and blankly look at all the options knowing full well that there are even so many more things within each option.

[jeeperman]

I am sure, although I do use gimp. Most of the time I am lost.

[Colin Southern]

Just did the arm for you ...



How does that look?

[proseak]

My 30 secs effort..

[ilovelucydog]

Thank you! That's great. I'll work on it a bit more. It's not the best technical shot-none of mine areyet. But, they're my boys and I am partial.

[ANSORB]

Thank you! That's great. I'll work on it a bit more. It's not the best technical shot-none of mine areyet. But, they're my boys and I am partial.

Haven't posted one of my own images for long while so maybe I shouldn't be playing with other people's quite so much. But Mary's guitar player is actually quite a challenge, not at all easy to fix the arm so that it keeps a reasonable amount of tone and sufficient colour variation to look natural in the mixed lighting. Given that Mary wants to modify it further it probably doesn't matter but I enjoyed the challenge and learnt quite a lot in the process. What I ended up with was this:



I did it mostly in Lab, (I don't think it would be possible in another colour space) and the workflow was roughly this.

1.In RGB duplicate the background layer
2.Invert the new layer.
3.Change the blend mode to colour
4.Convert to Lab
5.Build a mask from the a* and b* channels so that the right amounts of the background colour are revealed in the right places.

5 is the hard bit. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but it was mostly trial and error. I thought the result was quite good (a little to0 pale, but not much) and worth posting. If it helps Mary that's fine, and my thanks to her for a chance to try something new.

[ilovelucydog]

Thanks, John. That looks great. I've worked on it some, but got preoccupied with packing to move. I'd rather work on images.

[arith]

Not the easiest, but levels and hue and saturation gives, a little red.