Photoshop Tweaking exercise
 

These pictures were taken with a Panasonic NV-EX3 digital video camera. Still colour snapshots printed on an Epson 1270 printer look OK.

But still frames from a video were printing out with red blotches on hair and skin colours.

The examples below were saved at quality 5 in JPEG to keep the file size around 60K.

 
 

Above is the image saved directly from the DV Studio application.

 
 

Above is the image as it appeared when printed on glossy photo paper on the Epson 1270. To show it here I scanned back in at 150 dpi using the Epson Perfection 1600SU. The red blotchy effect is clearly visible.
  The result was the same whether I printed from the supplied DVStudio app or converted the BMP to a JPG in adobe Photoshop 5 LE. I initially assumed it was a colour balance problem, but removing red in Photoshop did not help.

So I asked on the Open List at Webnet for help. One solution is to convert to CMYK mode. Unfortunately, that was not available in Photoshop 5 LE. Michael Kelly of Labyrinth explained that I was getting colour clipping in the shadow areas. It can be illustrated in PhotoShop by using Image>Mode>Adjust>Variations where you can do some tweaking. The way he suggested - which worked - was to adjust the Levels. I used settings of Input: 0, 1.5, 255 and Output of 40, 255 to get the effect below. I also found that an Input of 0, 1, 180 worked on others. He also pointed out the De-Interlace video filter that smoothed out some jaggy lines.

 
 

This may look more washy, but it does not make the people look as if they have some awful skin condition with red patches!