How I made the background (and not her hair) pink

[unfo]

Sometimes I just don't have much time to set up. Case in point: if I see my daughter in a happy mood (i.e. not screaming or throwing things), I know I've got mere seconds to make that shot! Unfortunately, that can lead to a lot of post-production...

OK, so here's the original. Lit with SB800 shot through umbrella on camera left, in TTL, triggered by CLS. I threw up some white foam board at the last minute to use as background.

1. In Lightroom 1.4.1, crop and straighten.
2. In Photoshop Elements, clone out the couch and some food particles I missed when cleaning her face .
3. Realized I wanted more "pop" so back in Lightroom applied 6-Seim Effects Portrait Power and adjusted brightness, contrast, and black clipping.
4. In Gimp, grabbed the Saturation channel to use as a mask for adding a pink background later. (I didn't want to make her hair pink, and the saturation channel had the most contrast between hair and background).
5. Back in Elements, added a saturation layer in Colorize mode: Hue 0 Saturation 31 Lightness 0.
6. Pasted the saturation layer from Gimp into the layer mask (hint: ALT-click on the layer mask thumbnail), gave it more contrast using levels, and darkened in the face and shirt. Here's what the final mask looks like:
   

And the end result:



C&C always welcome!
-unfo

[JGennuso]

Wow! What a difference. Beautiful. I like how you angled her in the second one. Looks more like she is jumping! She is sooo cute. Adorable nose, lips and dimples.

[Nicole]

Really, really nicely masked. You'd never guess you didn't start with the pink background.

[candleman]

Originally Posted by Nicole

Really, really nicely masked. You'd never guess you didn't start with the pink background.

agreed. very good masking.. wow.

[FotoMike]

*Slow Clap* Great job...how long did it take to create the mask?

[RoyL]

Loved it in your original post and still love it.

Thanks for showing others how you achieved the effect.

[mfreg]

amazing.....I have a noob question, with the jumping back from software to software, I would assume you have to save the image each time, my understanding is the every time you save a .jpg the image degrades, but yours looks great.Are you working in a different format and only saving the final image as a jpeg ?

thanks for taking the time to post your steps.....I'm amazed at how you've done this.

regards
mike

[Jim Poor]

Very nicely done. Masin that hair would have been tough for me.

[unfo]

Thanks! Mike, my flow was from RAW to PSD, and I stayed in PSD the whole time after that, even for my brief detour into the Gimp. (I only needed Gimp because Elements doesn't support decomposition into channels, and there wasn't enough contrast in the luminance channel to mask that fine hair). The final image was an export to JPEG, but there was no going back and forth.

As with anything else, it only took me 15 minutes to do it---after several hours of figuring out how.

[Jim Bryant]

Good work...........

Originally Posted by unfo

Thanks! Mike, my flow was from RAW to PSD, and I stayed in PSD the whole time after that, even for my brief detour into the Gimp. (I only needed Gimp because Elements doesn't support decomposition into channels, and there wasn't enough contrast in the luminance channel to mask that fine hair). The final image was an export to JPEG, but there was no going back and forth.

As with anything else, it only took me 15 minutes to do it---after several hours of figuring out how.