Two PP questions

[NicoleScraps]

What is the best way to turn a white sky blue? It is not over exposed, just white because it really was white (overcast). I am thinking paint, mask, blend, but wanted to see what others do.

Also, how can I fix a red nose? It was chilly out today and the poor lady's nose is red in all of the photos. I am really not sure how to go about fixing that.

Okay, particulars. I have the raw files. I have lightroom 3 (which I do not really know how to use, so you must give me baby step directions for that program) and I have PSE 8.

I can post examples if you need me to.

Thanks so much!

[zona5101]

i assume pse8 can make selections and layers? Select the sky and put it on it's onw layer. Coloer it, cloud rendition filter is PSE has that . Then adjust the opacity to blend the layer. There are probably a dozen other ways to try as well.
For the nose, make a selection, cut to it's own layer and do a color adjustment. history brush to eliminate any line between the nose cut and the color corrected nose.
At least that would be my starting point....

[NicoleScraps]

Cool! Thanks! Some of them aren't so bad. Some of really bad, I have a lot of work to do on these, just with these two issues mostly.

[zona5101]

perhaps if you post one, somebody like edbayani can get it a go.

[NicoleScraps]

Okay, these are both full size, SOOC versions. The first one really shows off the white sky. Again, it really was white, not blue that I blew out and made look white, so there is no chance for recovery.
The 2nd one, you can see how red her nose is. These are both "keepers" from the photo session that I plan to fix up. Once you guys are done playing, I am probably going to delete them from flickr since they are full size and unwatermarked.

[edbayani]

there are several ways to do this. one is as zona5101 suggests. this sample i posted is the lazy way . i used the sponge tool and set it to desaturate, used a small soft brush and set it at 20% flow. i brushed the red portion of the nose until the red was gone. another way is to use the quickmask and with a smal soft brush, 100% opacity, brush the red portion of the nose and exit quick mask. this selects the red portion and since you used a soft brush the edges are very soft. you can either put this in another layer or work directly on it. hide the selection by pressing ctrlH so as not to distract yopu with the selection lines. you can use the hue and saturation to adjust the color. after correction, i duplicated the image, used gaussian blur to really blur it and reduced the opacity to 30% to soften it and used layer mask to brush at 40% the eyes and lips to show the underlying layer.



the other photo with the white sky , use the magic wand tool set to 30% and click on the white sky to select all the whites. press Q to put this in another layer.lock the layer so the transparent pixels wont be affected. use the chooser to select the shade of blue that you want and with a soft brush, set to 20% opacity carefully brush and click on portions varying the size and opacity. or use the filter render, clouds.i also adjusted using levels the background layer and corrected the nose and portions of the face which was also red due to the reflection of the red wall, with the sponge tool.



i hope this can be of help.

[NicoleScraps]

Um HELLO! Those are both amazing!! Yes, this helps tremendously!! Thank you!!

[NicoleScraps]

Seriously, edbayani I really appreciate your guidance here. I've been using PSE for about 3 years now and I have NEVER, not once, clicked on the sponge tool. I love it now. Easy peasy, I fixed her nose in all of the photos really quickly.




I had to mess with the render clouds filter to get it to look natural, but it worked out nicely I think. I actually forgot what photo I had originally posted her when I was playing around this morning, so this one is similar but different.



So thank you again!!

[edbayani]

hi, nicole, glad to hear that you now like the sponge tool. it really comes in handy for some fixes. so many things to learn, i, too keep on learning by experimenting with all the tools. and you're welcome.

[rward78]

cool fixes...