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| For this order, the customer submitted an image with quite a few issues: poor quality, dark, noisy, harsh purple color cast. |
When we receive these types of images, instead of over processing the subjects and adding too much brightness and contrast, it's better to work on the background first and make it match them as best as possible. If we brighten the original too much to begin with, we introduce even more noise and pixelation (see first version below). Here is a video on this topic:
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| Version1 |
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| Version 2 |
Once you make adjustments to the background first, then you can make relatively small brightness adjustments on the subjects. As you can see in the second version above, it’s an improvement over the first, since the background was dimmed and the subjects were only lightened a bit. But we still have some room for improvement. There are still purple hues visible, that we need to fix. Color work is very important to ensure realism. We can address this 1 of 2 ways:
1. Use selective color, hue/saturation and some manual coloring of the subjects (similar to colorizing) to get rid of the purple hue.
2. Change the color of the background to match their coloring, which may be easier, but you want to make sure you’re not drastically changing a Lookbook Design. Also make sure your first priority is healthy, good-looking skin tones.
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| This is what we want to send to the customer. |
Notice the clipping edges. The image lacks clarity, so sharp edges around the subjects look unnatural. We have to feather the mask more than we usually would when working with low quality photos.
And lastly, we need to degrade the quality of the background, to match the quality of the original. To do that, we should blur the background a bit (best to use Lens Blur Filter) and then add noise to it. Here is a Noise Action you can use to expedite your workflow when dealing with low quality images. This action does the following:
• Creates a new layer and fills it with 50% grey
• Adds noise to the layer and sets it to Linear Light blending mode
• Blurs the layer so that the size of the grain matches the original
All ready in 2-3 seconds! REMEMBER: Apply the layer over the background only, and not the subjects.
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