Damien Symonds

Do you agree that it looks the cleanest and nicest?

Oh, what about the other white door on the left, and the lamp on the right? Can they stay?

Oh, great question. No, this isn't a job for cloning. Give me a few minutes to play around, I'll be back shortly.

The absolute easiest way would be to change the background entirely. Are they married to that lattice thing?

The method to my madness is about to become clear, I hope. Zoom in to 100% view, then go to your Channels panel. Click on the word "Red", then "Green", then "Blue". Compare them I think you'll agree that the red channel has the nicest quality detail.

Sorry, I don't understand the question. What makes you say you need to do this?

Gosh, I think you did well!!! If you hadn't shown me the before, I would never have known you'd done anything.

No, once you've changed it once, it should stick. But of course always remember to glance down there, just to be safe.

Hey, this looks promising! May I also see the whole photo?

Oh gee Kathy, I'm really worried about this. Are you sure it's not too fuzzy now?

Oh, ok! In that case, can you do this for me?

Not in Bridge. In ACR. Just open one image in ACR, and look at the blue link at the bottom. Change it there, then go ahead and edit your photo as normal. http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html

Ok, great. If they're imposing such stringent requirements, they should be able to advise what CMYK profile to use.

Yeah, gosh, the pixels of the screen must be very small to fit 3200 of them across. How does it look now that you've made it 1600?

Hi Lauren, please read this first, then we'll discuss further.

Are the blacks so black because you like it that way, or because they can't be recovered in raw? For your blending to work best (yes, that was going to be my suggestion) you'll need little or no black clipping in raw.

It's a raw file, I assume?

I'm pretty sure my wife uses VLC for these.

Alas, I don't know of an easy way, sorry. It might be necessary to entirely reset PSE's preferences. To do so, simply hold down Ctrl Alt Shift as you launch it.

"Extracting" is impossible, so abandon any thought of that. The best you could hope for is to change the background to another very similar, very dark colour.

The inverted one, I'd say, as long as it's 16-bit.

Monitor calibration instructions

Yes, we really need to establish that your screen/calibration isn't the problem here.

Because in the absence of a monitor profile on your computer, telling all software exactly how to render photos, each software has to guess. If they guess differently, this is the result.

Well, it's one of those inverse-correlation things, you know? The more effort you put into getting the lighting right when you shoot, the less effort is required in post-processing; and vice versa. While it goes without saying that it would be reckless to just take a normal everyday photo of a belly and rely on some very advanced editing skills to turn it into this afterwards, I think it's also true to say that it would be unreasonable to expect to nail this perfectly in camera. Some editing will be involved. Because there is no hair in the photo, you don't need to worry about a black background when you're shooting. That can be easily dropped in in Photoshop. So when you're shooting, concentrate on the subject herself. Shadows in front, and that nice rim lighting. As long as you have shadows in the right places, you can darken them further later, so don't get hung up on making them fully black in camera. That's what Levels is for. Hope this helps. Once you take the Levels Class, a lot more about this will be clearer to you.