I took this picture and am trying to process it so that the model’s skin is more visible where the fabric is wet, especially by her boob. Here’s what I have so far. In Gimp, I just duplicated the layer, went to colors → Levels, and moved the mid-tone slider to the right. Then used a luminosity mask, which I touched up by hand. Results are acceptable, but I’m wondering if there’s a better way.
This is a close in crop of the area that I’m working on. I’m attaching a 16 bit TIFF also to this post so you have as much color data as I do. Suggestions?
Here is what I came up with using levels (mid-tone) slider, and masking:
Thanks for the suggestion. I don’t have darktable installed. I searched for “haze” and “dehaze” in G’MIC but did not find either one. Is it under another name?
By the way, here’s the finished picture. I’m still not sure if I’m entirely happy with it. I did what @paperdigits suggested and boosted the saturation in a duplicate layer. That helped a little bit. I had to make another layer mask, though, because her face was way more saturated than her body, so when I raised the saturation, I had to dial it back on her face a little bit.
I could not really figure out how to adjust contrast over her chest, because the brightness of the two different areas were so similar, I was working on a very tiny portion of the tone curve.
I’m still open to ideas about how to improve the processing in this pic, if anyone has them.
Which is a little more visible under the fabric? You can then come up with some creative masking (or manual masking with patience) to apply where/as needed.
You can also probably dupe the layer and do it again if you need to increase the effect. Careful, it gets wonky pretty quickly - so I’d play with the opacity of the layer + masking.
Her head and upper body looks fine to my eyes, but her lower body and legs are rather contrasty, highlights too high. Maybe lower contrast there? If I guess right, point of focus should be her head and upper body and contrast draws now too much attention where it shouldn’t be drawn to. The same applies to background if you don’t have any special reason to pop up the stones (or whatever they are).
I have been working very hard to improve my processing skills, and this is exactly the sort of feedback that I like. I agree with your comments. I could have burned those stones by her feet, and the bank of the creek in the background. I may take another whirl at processing this one based on the great feedback I’ve been getting in this thread. Maybe some very gentle burning on the lower half of her body. Thanks!!
Hahaha, Pat! I had no idea about the Twin Peaks photo until I started showing this one around. You are the third person to mention it to me. One was from a friend of mine. The other was some random guy who commented when I posted it to Instagram, and now you.
Anyways, I like my Twin Peaks picture better than theirs.
For those out of the loop, I think this is the photo that Pat is thinking of. I believe it was used on the cover of a DVD set for the Twin Peaks TV series. Funny thing is that I have never seen an episode of Twin Peaks.
