After I posted my first gallery, I realized that there was one pic that was of considerably lower quality in the mix. Oh sure, the subject matter was perfect, but the actual image quality was an entirely different story. The printout used for the tribute was grainy as hell, and Brynn/Firefly13's sexy, piss-soaked body deserved a better pic, so I got to work trying to create one for her.

My initial efforts didn't go nearly as well as planned. Oh sure, basic color correction worked fine, but there were bigger problems with this pic--it was riddled with digital noise, and any advanced corrections just weren't working out. After hours of trying to fix the thing, I finally saved my best attempt and posted it in my second gallery. I wasn't happy with the finished pic though, and felt like I could do better. I was already considering taking another shot at the pic later, but when I found out that Brynn/Firefly13 had to undergo surgery and was in a cast, I decided I was definitely going to try and touch up the pic again.

I started by taking Brynn's pic and loading it into a legit copy of Adobe Photoshop CS that's a little over 10 year's old, but definitely capable of doing what I needed it too. I immediately played around with three settings for basic color correction, except I applied them in six different orders and picked the best result. Then I popped open the "channels" setting. After examining each setting individually, I realized that the blue color channel had been destroyed. No seriously, it was completely fucked and there was really nothing that could be done to fix it, so it needed to be replaced. Thankfully, it's not too difficult to recreate one damaged color channel, so I checked the others. The red and the green color channels were fine, so I picked the green color channel, and made a copy of it.

Despite their name, color channels are actually gray when you rip them out of where they belong. (This has to with the way computers understand color, so I won't bore you guys with the details.) The "trick" was getting the green color channel to look as much like the blue color channel as possible. Adobe Photoshop includes a "match color" tool that's supposed to let you make the colors in one photo look like the colors in another. The blue color channel was shot, but at least it was salvageable enough for the "match color" tool. After switching modes a few times and playing around with the match color tool, the brightness/contrast tool, and stuff I'm probably forgetting about, I had something that looked pretty good. There was just one problem: two areas in the original blue color channel weren't the right color in either the red or the green color channel, so I'd lose them if I just swapped my cleaned up green turned blue color channel for the original. Instead, I duplicated the layer I was using for my new blue color channel, took the original blue color channel and copied it into the same Photoshop file, and used it as a reference to alter my modified green turned blue color channel properly. With the missing detail restored, I replaced the blue color channel.

The new blue color channel worked perfectly! No seriously, compare the original photo and my first touch up attempt to the second one. Almost all of the digital noise that was causing major problems with the pic was gone, leaving me with a pic I could work with. I did a bit more color correction and noise reduction, and soon had a pic I was pleased with. I also created a version with a "10% sepia" and "25% yellow" photo filter to make the pic look a little more like the original pic. I'm pretty pleased with the way the newly touched up pics came out, and both versions have been added to my second Imagefap gallery.

Anyway, to make a long story short, these are basically a "get well" gift for Brynn/Firefly13 that everyone's welcome to enjoy. Brynn, I hope you feel better soon, and that ya like the pics! I can't wait to see what kinds of dirty things you do once you're feeling better. :D