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Colour Balance and Overlays
If you've followed this series, you'll have the general process of retouching essentially in place - you can dodge and burn the physical image layer, and layer and mask pretty much anything and everything else.
We've touched upon curves and brightness, but there's one other major element - colour. First, you need to comprehend colour from a traditional perspective, which will help you in the realisation of how colour can be corrected as a whole.
There's (as far as you need to be concerned) two working colours spaces. There's RGB (Red, Green, Blue) for screen. And there's CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key ['key' can be taken as 'Black']) for print.
When traditionally printing, a photograph may oversaturate one colour or another and it needs to be corrected for that process. Corrections can be made to be more accurate to reality, or aesthetically to correspond to a certain mood or feeling that you wish to convey.
Colours work in opposites - take CMYK. This breaks down into Cyan (Red opposite), Magenta (Green opposite) and Yellow (Blue opposite). (Key/Black is the accumulation of CMY, and is not treated in the same way).
Also colours convey an essence of warmth or coldness - for example, if you have a face that is too green it looks a little alien and has a 'cold' feel. By pushing more magenta into the equation (opposite colour), you are able to re-level this channel and balance the colour with a greater sense of warmth.
Colour balancing is difficult to perfect - and some people are good at it, some not so. But you can train yourself by practice and becoming acutely aware of colours.
Calibration and lighting conditions are very important - but are a whole other story, so we'll leave that for the future. Just keep in mind that any surrounding ambient light can affect your colour judgement (so working in dark conditions is good). Monitor calibration is important to keep colours accurate, and print calibration is even more integral to match your monitor. There are various devices (such as the Pantone Huey Pro) that can assist in your colour accuracy.
For aesthetic reasons you may wish to counter certain colours - skin is particularly complex as it is made up of a whole range of colours, and each persons' skin is very different from the last.
Skin retouching will often involve seeking out those colour patches - say the blue/green around the eyes - and levelling them out to match the rest of the face more accurately.
As previously, a lot of this can be done with adjustment mask layers of colour balance. Don't be too afraid to utilise many multiple layers to balance the colour out in different parts as you see appropriate - it can be a lengthy process to obtain the kinds of results that you are looking for, but it worthwhile.
Take this example of before, after, and then an explanation of what the five colour layer masks and one curve layer mask are adjusting. It may appear most simple, particularly when compressed on screen - but it really makes all the difference in print.
Example:
Before,
After,
Details,
Toggle your mouse between “before” and “after” and you'll see what this tutorial is all about.
Finally, another little trick of the trade - colour overlays. This trick used a fair amount in professional fashion and beauty.
Select a pleasing colour that is representative of the skin tone that you are working with - this is done by using the Eyedropper Tool and clicking on the relevant part of the image where you wish to “sample” one single colour. You may want to do this a number of times until you see a good image in your palette.
When you have your colour, create a new solid colour layer. This layer should auto fill with your Eyedropper colour selection. Leave the layer on top and drag the percentage down until it “brings together” that final bit of colour. It almost “softens” the image without losing any of the overall sharpness - plus can gloss everything up a little extra.
All these elements, however seemingly minor taken singly, contributes to the overall effect - it's quite feasible that a great deal more could still be done to this image... it could be smoothed more among other things. But it is up to you to decide the moment of closure - go too far and you may make changes that are so big that they undermine the overall integrity of the image. Ultimately, if you can show someone a retouched image and they don't notice, but think it's amazing, then you know you have the job in the bag:
Example:
Before,
After,
Toggle your mouse between “before” and “after” and you'll see what this tutorial is all about.
Next time - "Liquification" completes the series...watch this space.
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