Damien Symonds

Yep, this is great. Great news!!!! Oh crap, yes, of COURSE you must do that before flattening. That cloning/healing layer must be part of your PSD file. May I see a screenshot of your layers panel?

Christy ... this is me. I'm aware of how boastful this sounds, but I'm a REALLY good Photoshop operator. There aren't many people in the world with better skills than I have. I was able to achieve that result, using only Photoshop, with the average-standard raw edit you supplied me with. If you aspire to achieve a similar level of work, you're gonna need to give yourself the best possible start by doing the best possible raw editing.

You only gave me a jpeg file, so of course I couldn't do any of it in ACR.

Yes, but it would be pretty expensive. At least $25 per photo, probably more for more complicated ones.

No, sorry.

Yeah, that's better. How many photos have this problem? The Adobe RGB problem, I mean, not the stage lighting problem.

Nope, still Adobe RGB.

Fair enough. First, fix the much more serious problem: https://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html

Sure! What colour would you like the background to be? (Don't say black, by the way. It can't be done. It needs to be another light colour.)

That does look like you've overdone it. I think 63 is unnecessarily high.

Yes, I know, and you'll learn about the others in the Raw Class. But for now, those are the two important ones.

I'm sorry too. It's sports carnival day at my kids' school today, so I went along there for a bit. First place for my son in his race! I've come back to catch up on a few questions. I forgot about the noise! How incompetent of me! I'll need to see a 100% crop to assess the noise. Here are the instructions for raw noise removal. If you didn't do the noise removal properly at the beginning, then yes, you'll have to start over. For a job of this magnitude, it's CRITICAL that all noise is gone. As I said earlier, make sure you do all your editing in the exactly usual way. That means NO FLATTENING. Make sure you save your fully-edited master file as a PSD file with all the layers intact. Read this important information I'm so desperately sorry, I can't tell you how to sharpen, because you're not in my Sharpening Class. I can't talk about class content outside of class. (This probably answers your last question.) This is a VERY good question - possibly the most important question of all. But we'll come back to it a bit later, once all the editing is done and the PSD file is saved. Please remember, though, DON'T CROP DURING EDITING. Leave all those blank edges around your image and everything. This is so important. Read more info Yes, this is vital. I guess I don't need to remind you how BIG and PUBLIC this photo is going to be, so we MUST get the colour right. Yeah, I wish that too, but the important thing is that you're here now. We'll rock this, I promise.

Crap

This is SO important. Your photo will rock, or look f&*king awful, depending on getting the CMYK conversion right. You must ask the question, and don't stop asking it until you get a clear answer. "What CMYK profile do I use?"

In case you like it, here's the file so you can see how: Download PSD

By the way, I know you didn't post for editing advice, but if it was my photo, I'd use Channel Mixer for the wheat. What do you think of this?

Great! So just do that again. DEFINITELY don't try to restitch anything.

Gosh no! Just make the wheat golden in your RGB file. How did you do it last time? A Hue/Saturation layer?

I can't stress this enough. You must have a completely edited master file in RGB.

If you had, you'd know that these things never look crisp up close. It's perfectly normal. I'm just trying to put your mind at ease about the quality aspects of this. And instead, I need to make you appropriately nervous about the issues that really matter. https://www.damiensymonds.net/2011/05/please-be-wary-of-cmyk.html No no! Not at all! You're doing perfectly.

I need to see the RGB master version, not the CMYK version.

Neither of us have time to debate this, nor to change what you've done. You've already stitched, so let's persist with it.

Have you seen one? For real, I mean?

These specs stink of BS. This job of yours will be printed at about 50ppi, so for them to say they need 150ppi is complete nonsense. Plus there's no information about the CMYK profile you need to use. Have you worked with these people before? Do you have any proof that they're actually competent? And they're sticking to this rubbish about "50% at 200ppi"?