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I did a shoot last night for Andrew from Greatest American Dog along with two other of his doggy siblings.

This is Geoffrey who has a bit of trouble with tear tracks.

So far, the best way I've come up with to deal with something this extensive is to do a B&W conversion and mess with the red sliders for saturation and luminosity.

I could go hair by hair and retouch the whole thing, but I'm wondering if you all have any other ideas that are less labor intensive. I've got nearly 100 images and while I'm sure I won't need to retouch them all, any time-savers would be great.





Jim,

Yes tear staining is the bane of white dog owners, especially the little ones like the Maltese. This will happen to dogs of any color that tear or salivate alot which allows red yeast to grow and stain the coat. In a white dog like this maltese it can get pretty bad. I can't imagine the amount of time and money Maltese owners put into trying to get rid of this.

Anyway, it seemed like a good challenge. I can't say that my method was really a time saver, but I thought I'd take a shot with my favorite RAW converter Capture NX2, because it uses color control points that can selectively control colors. Actually I thought the conversion to BW was a good idea except that you lose all the color. For these I used several control points to desaturate specifically the red stain. I left just a little color in the face (otherwise it would just be the same as your BW version) for the first two. For the second one I went a little further and cloned out a couple of the distracting strands. For the third one I desaturated and lightened the red almost to complete BW. The beauty of the control points is it allowed for selective contol without having to mask.

This method works fine for several keepers but would still be cumbersome for doing hundreds.

Geo