I was feeling a little evil with Photoshop earlier and went after the following picture.  I want to see if you guys can tell what I did.  Good luck.

Regards,
Brad

You put the noise making thing into the second girls’ mouth.

I count the yellow hair, the black shirt, the lei on the brunette, the red color on the milk-crate, and maybe the bit of yellow on the front of the “blond’s”  shirt.

That’s without blowing it up.

Something was added to the blonde’s back hip pocket as well.

Something is painted onto the grocery bag it seems.

On 2001-07-07 23:26, Bryan wrote:
I count the yellow hair, the black shirt, the lei on the brunette, the red color on the milk-crate, and maybe the bit of yellow on the front of the “blond’s”  shirt.

That’s perhaps overdoing it a little, Bryan.  The black shirt is real, as is the lei, the red color on the milk crate, and the bit of yellow (which happens to be a lei).

You are correct, the frontmost person actually has brown hair.  That is the only thing I’ve changed.  I’ve been trying lately to be able to change features like hair color and eye color in Photoshop using various methods, but I haven’t quite got it to look quite real yet.  I had you guys look at it because I know what she should look like, and thus I already know its fake.

Here’s the original image:

Any comments on how to do it better?

Brad

Heh, sorry to be so wrong on that!  The colors of the things I was listing all seemed false, but I didn’t want to blow it up to check (that would defeat the purpose).

Hopefully a better Photoshopper than me can offer you some better advice, but I would recommend checking out the kinds of colors in real ohotos (like hair), and comparing them to images you have altered.

Yeah, its really hard to get that “real” look.  I spent several hours doing little modifications and lighting effects, but I always ended up with a too bright yellow or a fake bleached blonde look.

Brad

Some of the color and detail problems are probably because of the UMAX scanner and software.  The image is about two years old.  Oddly, so much of it looks like it could have been fake.

Brad

I brought the white point down slightly in Levels, opened Curves, set a control in the middle and brought the lower half of the curve up (making kind of an “S”) to lighten the hair, then off to Hue/Saturation for a little Ted Turner Colorization(tm).

The important thing for realism is in being careful to not oversaturate on the color and not losing the shadows when lightening (the one above has been de-saturated a bit). How far you can push it is where the experimentation comes in—mine’s a touch green, your milage may vary.

Thanks!  I’ll have to experiment with that.

Brad