Any suggestions?

[skbohanon]

I took this picture this morning of a group for a company Christmas card. The lighting is HORRIBLE in this place! Not to mention they always insist on wearing these red sweaters which always looks bad.
Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions on how to help with the lighting?
I've worked with a Levels layer, Brightness/Contrast, Enhance/Adjust Color, adding a blur layer to help... no luck. I'm out of ideas. So I'm turning to the experts...

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1xbU1mSc4NJ0sospOwsxQxxwkyZ0

Thank you!!
Susan

[Pauline]

This might not be exactly what you are looking for but it's an option.

http://img113.imageshack.us/img113/9862/1xbu1msc4nj0sospowsxqxxwkyz6ov.th.jpg (http://img113.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1xbu1msc4nj0sospowsxqxxwkyz6ov.jpg)

I went to filter>render>lighting effects
Chose default style and spot light. I made it come up from the bottom and turned it into a circle. You can pick different lighting effects. Play around with it, it's fun. To change where the light shines, just move the square handles in and out or around. You can use other lights too. This is just the one that I quickly tried.

The reds are horrible!! It's way to saturated. Options are to do what I did and make a hue/saturation adjustment level. Pick the red channel and tone down the saturation (I used -51). OR change a few shirts to green! :twisted:

[lindajay]

And here's one with the levels adjusted. I used a layer mask and subdued the levels adjustment on the background, with a low opacity soft brush. I also adjusted the hue (desaturated) on the one red sweater that was so much brighter than the others (man on front, right). Pauline's spotlight looks nice, too!

http://img471.imageshack.us/img471/1909/officecrew1ub.th.jpg (http://img471.imageshack.us/my.php?image=officecrew1ub.jpg)

[Tom M]

Hard to work on a tiny image.
Did levels adjustment.
On a new layer in overlay mode filled with 50% gray, did dodging with a white brush.
http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/1562/1xa7fg.th.jpg (http://img245.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1xa7fg.jpg)

[skbohanon]

Wow! These are great! Thanks for all the ideas. I will work with each of them and see which one I like the best.

Thanks everyone!

[TonyW]

OK - One more and I've had some practice as I took a bunch like that at a local show at the weekend and had to do some fixing up. My problem was the flash was lighting the foreground OK but I wanted to bring out the background.

I like the shadow/highlight adjustment which I used at pretty much the default settings, then did an additional levels tweak. To tone down the red sweaters I used an old photographers trick of using a cyan photo filter - cyan being the opposite of red removes some red from the image - I used it as an adjustment layer so you can mask out bits that you don't want the red removed from if you want.

As always there are lots of different ways to get to much the same result :)

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1mjObDehXF6AIy6ItFwCdQz15Vring1

Tony

[kevq]

Hi,
I did mine the easy way -- Enhance - Colour Variations, just played with the settings then colour enhance.
Kev.

http://img344.imageshack.us/img344/9502/redshirtw6rg.th.jpg (http://img344.imageshack.us/my.php?image=redshirtw6rg.jpg)

[Daviskw]

Hello all

New to the forum but hought I'd give it a try. I followed the procedures of most above but just for fun I tried to increase the size to see how bad it would degrade. I used a clipping mask and a level adjustment to paint the faces bright so they could be recognized better. ThenI sharpend it using high pass three different times and had to use a blur layer set to color to remove a lot of color noise. Then a screen layer to get it bright... maybe too bright.

Butch

http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/2143/temp13fo.th.jpg (http://img412.imageshack.us/my.php?image=temp13fo.jpg)

[willpresley]

I used the color wheel and used the photo filter from within the layers palette -- chose a green that appeared to compliment the red. Didn't do any levels or any other adjustments -- just trying to get the red under control.


http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1giwK2IsQl8iVoVQDl30I7ZJKhttj0

[skbohanon]

Thanks again for all the great tips!! And all the effort put forth to help me out. I appreciate it!
I've got a couple more techniques to work on and then hopefully finalize one that I like.

Thanks again!