ZOMBIES! or, How To Add Some Color To The Living Dead

Thanks to amateur digital photographers, we see dead people.

Digital photography has changed the world of Photoshop and photography in amazing ways, with designers, sales reps and even clients now able to grab their digital camera and take a product shot or portrait shot with the resolution to print in a fine magazine. Who needs professional photographers, now that a $500 camera can capture enough pixels for just about any computer application, which itself is only a few hundred dollars off the shelf, and that digital image can be used practically anywhere? Who needs professional photographers? Some might argue that we ALL are professional photographers.

The difference, though, is that professional photographers have years of training and experience. Now that photography has become accessible to all, us print professionals are seeing a glut of bad photographs coming across our desks and into our inboxes. Low resolution, bad lighting, cell phone photos—we’ve seen it all. But for this Halloween I will focus on one bad photograph in particular, seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: What color is his skin?…neutral gray?!

The scary part? The fleshtone reads as 207R/207G/207B—neutral gray. How can this be? Nothing, not even a color cast? This poor man, in the prime of life, forced to walk the world (and be printed in a society magazine) looking like the undead? Not if I could help it, and I was determined to bring this man back to life, Frankenstein-style.

This is an exercise in color correction, and it’s a simple three-part procedure of setting the shadow, highlight and fleshtone colors. If you want more information on these and other color correction techniques, pick up Dan Margulis’ Professional Photoshop.

Step 1: Use the Eyedropper tool to pinpoint the shadow, highlight and average fleshtone in the image. See Figure 2 to see where I set these points.

Figure 2: My eyedropper points.

Step 2: Make sure the Info palette is visible, and you can see the color information for all three points. The Info palette will display each point’s color information at the bottom of the palette; I’ve included Figure 3 below to illustrate.

Figure 3: The Info palette.

Step 3: Open the Curves dialog box (Cmd-M/Ctrl-M) and press Cmd-1/Ctrl-1 or select Red in the Channel drop-down menu. Then drag the shadow point on the curve either left or down until the red color number for the shadow point reads 15.

Step 4: Select Green (Cmd-2/Ctrl-2) and do the same with that shadow point, then select Blue (Cmd-3/Ctrl-3) and do the same. When you are done the color numbers for the shadow point should read 15R/15G/15B.

Step 5: Repeat steps 2 and 3, but this time drag the highlight point either up or right, and the goal is to attain color numbers of 245R/245G/245B for the highlight point. Click OK to exit the Curves dialog box. See Figure 4 for the image with updated shadow and highlight points.

Figure 4: Just a couple changes, but the man is beginning to revive….

The reason for steps 2 through 4 is to remove any color cast. If the image’s shadow and highlight are neutral (and in RGB, neutral colors have equal color numbers) then a color cast cannot exist.

Our test subject is starting to show signs of life due to the radical change in highlight point. The man’s white undershirt was baby blue when it should have been white, and fixing that also zapped some of the blues in the face, leaving behind reds and yellows. Now we’ll focus on the fleshtone point by converting to CMYK and making its color numbers a formula fleshtone color.

Step 6: Convert the image to CMYK color (Image -> Mode -> CMYK Color).

After the CMYK conversion, the fleshtone point reads as 0C/14M/20Y/0K. The black value is okay, but there should be a few points of cyan and maybe 30-40 points of yellow and magenta, with more yellow than magenta.

Figure 5: My curves for Step 7.

Step 7: Repeat step 3, but now you will work with the cyan, magenta and yellow channels separately. Raise the curve where each color number in the fleshtone lies. Look at Figure 5, which is my curves for cyan, magenta and yellow. You’ll see how I took each color number for the fleshtone and raised it to satisfy my fleshtone formula. You will be able to see your changes to the image if you have the Preview box checked in the Curves dialog box, and if the changes don’t look quite right you can tweak them as necessary.

Figure 6: It’s alive! It’s alive!

Figure 6 is the final image. This image still can benefit from some further color correction (working in LAB mode would be very helpful here) and sharpening, but our goal was to bring this image back from the dead and with some curves corrections we did just that. Curves is a great way to correct a range of tones and introduce nice color where absolutely none exists.