PP Power: Pink-ish To Purple

[delgadina]

Hi! I recently began a photo project called Rainbows and Rubber Soles, where I depict the colors of the rainbow (ROY G BIV) through various kinds of footwear. Forum posting here and Flickr set here.

I shot my picture for Violet yesterday, borrowing a pair of pretty suede flats from a friend. My makeshift backdrop was actually a top of mine made of velvet. I thought they would look good together at the time, but the velvet backdrop looked too much like magenta, and was a distraction to the shoes.

I liked the picture well enough, but was unsatisfied with the color of the backdrop. So, I opened up Adobe Photoshop CS3 and attempted my first major post-production.

This is the original picture.


I applied a Hue and Saturation mask, and played around with the Hue slider until I got a shade satisfactory enough for the picture. However, while the backdrop was correctly colored, the shoes were not. Since I used a layer mask, I was able to erase the hue changes to the shoe while maintaining the color of the backdrop. That was the biggest change I did.

I applied the Clone Stamp tool on the black corner on the upper-left side to make it more seamless. Using the Clone Stamp again, I removed the unfocused flower parts on the left shoe, because their original color had a pink-ish tone which was also distracting. Haha! I also cropped the entire picture so there would be less foreground. I ended my post-processing with a slight curve adjustment to fix the exposure.

This is the final product.

[wulf]

The colour shift is a definite improvement. It might also be worth toning down the saturation though - at the moment, the backdrop is still very dominant because it is such a rich colour.

Wulf