Damien Symonds

Levels, yes.

If you'd taken Raw you wouldn't have made this tyro mistake.

I have no record of you in the raw class?

1 minute ago, Lturner said:

In the meantime, will reducing noise in RAW and then editing fix this?

AND resizing properly for print.  This is crucial.

PLEASE change your life: http://www.damiensymonds.net/training.html

3 minutes ago, Lturner said:

Well, damn. I usually just run the image processor when saving and converting to jpg

That stops TODAY.  Have some pride in your prints.

Now that we're looking at the 100% crops, can you see the problem?

http://www.damiensymonds.net/2010/07/raw-noise-removal.html

Now, may I see a 100% crop from one of the "bad" jpeg print files?

And maybe one from a good one too, for comparison.

Yeah, this is all wrong.  You can't just upload uncropped, unresized, unsharpened files, and expect them to print properly.

As I said earlier, your 8x10 print jpegs should be (usually) between 500KB and 2MB.

http://www.damiensymonds.net/2011/09/cropping-tutorial.html

http://www.damiensymonds.net/trainingsharp.html

I don't understand the problem?  Click on the jpeg files that you uploaded, then show me those same properties screenshots.  Showing the file size, the dimensions, and so on.

Then why are you showing me PSD details?  They're irrelevant.

You're not uploading PSD files to ROES, are you????????????????

5 minutes ago, Lturner said:

File sizes are all over 200 mb.

Can you clarify this?  Did you mean 200KB?

8x10 print files should be (usually) somewhere between 500KB and 2MB.

Have you actually printed them?  Or is this just what you're seeing in the ROES preview?

Did you do this?  http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html

Which direction?

Hi Brian, it's this.

I very much fear the angles won't work.  I'm trying it, but the angle is implausible.  Nobody would naturally have such a flexible neck that they could turn their face so directly to the camera when their body is so side-on, if you know what I mean.

Yes, it's just the same.  You need to convert your files to DNG format.

I'd love to see how this turned out!

10 minutes ago, nunubaby said:

I am doing Santa minis this year Damien and am keen to recreate a similar look as is discussed here. I have Santa coming for a text shoot next week so I'll have some images to play with then and have already downloaded and explored the NIK collection - which looks awesome!

My question, and feel free to tell me to bog off as it's not strictly processing related, is this: Is there anything I need to consider when shooting this (does it need to be lit a particular way) to get this kind of look?

That's an excellent question.  Brian is a lot better to answer it, and I hope @Kim will chime in too.  I'm going to move this thread to Brian's area.

9 minutes ago, nunubaby said:

The client LOVED her image!

Was that the colour change thing?

Yes, I'm confident that with the right Levels adjustments I can help you disguise that.

Go ahead and do your raw processing as normal, then post again and we'll talk about the underwear.

Alas, no.  Not with something artificial like this.  Even if it's not there in Photoshop, you can't trust that it will print without banding.

Can't mathematics tell you that?  13x19=247 square inches.

I fear I might be missing the essence of this question.

No, this looks as cheesy as hell.  If it's meant to be a light source, it should actually be bright.

6 hours ago, Jolene10 said:

I did not see it in the original raw file.

When did you begin to see it?  After your raw processing, or after your Photoshop editing?

Absolutely. After only a few days, you'll be used to it, and wonder how you ever tolerated it so nuclear-bright before.

This is your first step to proper accurate editing.  Well done.