Damien Symonds

No, the wool in the shadow still looks distinctly more in-focus than the rest.

Fantastic. The last thing is to paint some more on the mask of the topmost pixel layer, with a low-opacity brush, to partially blend that area of sharper wool on the bottom left shadow area of the basket.

Yay!!!

No, something's gone wrong. At that stage, it shouldn't look like a photo, it should just look like digital gibberish.

This is common, sadly. First, try this. Also, do this for us.

Gosh I hope so.

Then you might have to live with it, I'm afraid.

Can't you see the lines? The edges? At the bottom of the basket, and to the left and right?

Ok, so you're seeing banding in the background, no matter which profile you choose?

You have to flatten to sharpen anyway, so I don't see that this is a problem? If it suits both you and your editor to exchange jpeg files, that in no way hinders the output process.

Sorry about my delayed reply. Busy morning. And how about the neutrals? Grey or near-grey areas? Are they ok?

Still some very visible lines at the bottom.

No, it's likely to be one of these. Can you remember which is the current one?

How about skintones?

Interesting. This is good news, yes?

You are not kidding. Start here.

Well, the bits of fur you've put in there are way bigger than the existing fur, you know?

It's really not working, is it You've enlarged the sections way too much, I feel.

Yeah, I reckon it's feasible. It's so great that all the backgrounds are the same colour - blue - albeit varying shades. We can work with that. May I see 100% crops from each face?

I think you must be referring to this one. This is if you want to add the extra Image Size step after cropping. But please don't bother. It's unnecessary.

Since I've written several articles on this subject, could you tell me which one you're reading presently?

That'd be great, thanks.

Per my instructions, the piece of paper where you took all the readings. Like this: http://www.damiensymonds.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/15i1dppc09.jpg

Because that's what the monitor profile is for, you see. To compensate for the natural crappiness of your screen. That monitor profile is a record of all the flaws of your screen. Photoshop reads that profile, and uses it to compensate for all the screen's flaws when showing you your photos. I'm over-simplifying things a lot here, of course, but that's the nub of it.

Ok, yeah, 450 is pretty darn high for brightness. I'm not surprised you're having troubles. Can you leave the Brightness at 0, and calibrate to "Native" luminance in the X-Rite software. Before you do that, though, may I see a pic of your piece of paper where you wrote down all the temperature results from the different colour presets?