Fascinating to see so many different interpretations of the same image.
Broadly speaking there seem to be two main approaches - either making the people as bright as possible or attempting to retain (or enhance) the nighttime atmosphere.
The par version is a very good rendition of the first approach, and this most fits the brief I think. 
However the second approach possibly makes for a more interesting image. 
In the second camp I would put 904,  912, 920, 921, 925 and 926, with 926 getting closest to the brief. 
904 and 912 are the most "dramatic" and perhaps closest to how we would have experienced such a scene "in real life".
If this was a different type of gathering (one in which the top table guests are  more important than the others) then 920 could be a strong contender.
An average version of all these images is I think excellent and a strong contender against the current par version.
911 is a good compromise between the two approaches. The masking is obvious when seen along side the others but when viewed standalone this is not a problem.

Of the brighter versions 906,914 and 930 are to my mind the best examples.They have managed to reduce the blue cast from the flash without making the scene too orange, but still retained the warm summer evening feeling. The faces have fairly even lighting and the overall contrast is good. 

The family reunion image posed multiple challenges that helped me learn more in several areas.

 

Noise. EXIF shows ISO 2000. Sky shows diffuse light colored grains consistent with luminosity noise, and the faces of people at the far table have irregularities consistent with noise. When I attempted corrections initially, the noisy faces all became more distorted and blotchy. Lesson learned: fix the noise first. Early attempts at noise removal led to faces being excessively smooth with diminished detail that was only partly corrected by applying the green channel to the red. Tried Topaz AI method with low settings without great improvement. In the end, I made a duplicate background layer and applied the camera raw filter with low luminosity noise reduction that seemed to work well enough.

 

In the submissions, 922 has a pattern of white dots in the dark sky consistent with stars. I don’t see this pattern in the original, making me suspect replacement with night sky from another image, but would be fascinated if some technique removed noise while leaving stars. 924 has a sky that looks like snow. Family members would probably ignore even the noisiest sky, but the various images with blotchy or distorted faces seem problematic.

 

Color. The people at the back table have very warm skin tones (reds, yellows) consistent with tungsten and candle lighting wile the people at the near table have cool skin tones consistent with other light, possibly flash. All could benefit from better color. I found that the skin desaturation action helped moderate the impact of MMM+CB, but did not effectively deal with the difference in lighting. I tired quite a few variations of channel and luminosity masking without finding a good combination for this. Desaturating and moving everything to the blue end of the scale did allow more uniformity but looked uninviting and depressing. I might have tried applying color look up tables, but these are beyond my current skill set.

 

Pondering about LUTs led me to consider a solution involving dishonesty about the color right from the start. So, after noise reduction, I used the camera raw filter “calibration” section to falsify the reds as being +15 up the color scale from “reality.” In the calibration section, I also desaturated the reds and blues both to negative 15. This made all the skin colors much closer together. Experimenting showed I could now skip the skin desaturation action. Running MMM+CB with a rough selection of faces, tables, and flags, and using the endpoint layer on auto produced quite strong colors (but skin fairly consistent among the group). Turning off the MMM saturation layer and MMM color layer helped somewhat. On return to sRGB, two additional steps helped. First, a hue-saturation layer lightening yellows to +20 and reds to +10 and boosting master saturation to +20. Then a final adjustment applying the camera raw filter to move color balance negative 10 (mild reduction of yellows that were still too strong) but tempered with blend-if to exclude reduction in the light blues (allowing the closer tablecloths and shirts to retain some of the inviting warmth and make color across the group a bit  more even).

 

Two dark faces. The seated man with an iPhone and the elderly-appearing woman at the apex of the tables both started with darker faces than most. I was not able to find global masking that would help them while not hurting others. I finally gave up and added a curves layer with points added to moderately lighten the RGB curve, slightly lighten the red curve, and slightly darken the green curve. Black mask, then painted just the two faces with low opacity white to selected parts of face/neck/hair with some improvement in color and impression of detail. Many of the entries had reasonable results with these faces, so I’ll be watching for clues about more efficient approaches.

 

Overall. I was surprised by the wide range of submitted results. The most favorable ones to my (non-expert) eyes are the 931 PAR version along with 908, 911, 921, 925, 927, and 930. Admittedly, one of those is mine, which I will identify later after allowing time for others to submit their comments first.

Robert Wheeler

Mine is #901

I have a different view of what others call "noise".

I have made no attempt to remove the noise or grain because as I see it...

when a person takes a picture with their camera,

 the picture.. comes with noise!

I like to keep the picture as natural as possible
because to me.. the people are most important.

I want to be able to capture the personalty of a person,
their soul...and those features are mixed in with
the details of their features and the noise/grain.

I believe, if you remove the noise, you remove the soul.

Just removing one single catch light from a person's eyes will remove their soul completely.

When the photo is printed and passed around ...everyone only looks at the photo of themselves only.

That's a lot of people to please.

So I make them as bright and colorful as possible. Bring them ...back to life.

Hector Davila

I found this one of the most difficult exercises so far. The main focus of the image is the table and the persons. The large majority of these elements is white. As a consequence, PPW doesn't work very well. Color Boost would emphasize the leaves, the flags, the floor tiles and the blue shirt on the left - none of these makes the image particularly better in my opinion.

Also there was something odd with the color. The table cloth is supposed to be white or close to white, but when I made it white, the faces got too pinkish (A equal or even larger than B). So I decided to leave a bit of yellow in the whites. (My version is #907). Still, not an easy thing to find the best hue overall.

Then, how light do you want the image to be? I prefer the lighter versions, after all white is white. Being at the scene, we would perceive the cloth and white shirts as white and not some middle gray. But the danger is that detail gets lost. As an example, #908 has good, strong whites but the detailing is subpar. #904 on the other hand is on the dark side, but the folds in the cloth look very good.
#919 does both very well (definitely one of my favorites).

To counter the disbalance in color and luminosity, I applied a few gradient masks. Effective and invisible. No need to make complicated selections or apply some magic in LAB.

Noise wasn't such a problem. What was there was not very obtrusive, and could easily be reduced.
--
Gerald Bakker
http://geraldbakker.nl

Again, I found the range of efforts interesting and surprisingly large - a reflection of the diversity in this group?

 

I thought this image was in some ways pretty straightforward. It's underexposed of course, probably due to the photographer shooting directly into the two spotlights at rear. I was surprised to see that while pretty much everyone brightened the overall scene, some people enhanced the "candlelight" effect, leaving the people in the shot relatively dark. A couple folks went to work on the spotlights themselves, darkening them to the point of minimizing them, and one person completely retouched them out.

 

The relatively cool light of the on-camera flash dominates the left half/foreground, while the folks at the rear table are painted with the orange-yellow of incandescent lights. It looks like there were several different kinds of responses here as well, from cooling or warming color overall to desaturating, to "re-lighting" with a spotlight effect.

 

Anyway, for my entry (#930): I started with the premise that the most important task is a pleasing rendition of the people. I re-processed the jPeg through Lightroom, increasing exposure & contrast, lifting shadows plus adding some Vibrance. Then I used graduated filters to darken the left half of the shot while adding exposure & decreasing color temp from the right third of the image. The resulting was surprisingly good - I almost submitted it. But hey, this is an ACT exercise, right? and I want to learn to use PPW tools better, so I continued with the Lightroom re-processed file. It needed some noise reduction to start with, then after global "brightening" & contrast boost, complimentary color corrections to the two halves of the shot. I then used MMM+CB (greatly dialed-back intensity), a narrow strip of H-K layer (again lowered opacity) for local contrast in the people, and with a couple final tweaks got to pretty clean color & pleasing contrast (I think).

 

A couple compositional elements still bugged me - the leafy canopy of the tree seemed way too prominent lit up by the flash, and distracted from the people. So I darkened & desaturated it. The floor also seemed too bright, and the terra cotta-looking bowl in a prominent intersection just jumped out at me, so I retouched it out (what is that, anyway?). I see three other people also got rid of it.

 

One thing I'm not so happy with now - the greenery behind the people on the left side is too bright & saturated, I should have addressed that.

 

John Lund

www.jwlimages.com

Mine is 925. I experimented briefly with gradients to mask color transition areas only to quickly prove to myself that I need to learn a lot more about gradient techniques before I can actually use them. Interesting to find that others used them productively, so I'll move the topic higher up in my learning plan.
Robert Wheeler

The floor also seemed too bright, and the terra cotta-looking bowl in a prominent intersection just jumped out at me, so I retouched it out (what is that, anyway?). I see three other people also got rid of it.

Thereby eliminating memories of the family dog?  :-) :-)

Rex

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 10:49 PM, <jwlimages@...> wrote:

One thing I'm not so happy with now - the greenery behind the people on the left side is too bright & saturated, I should have addressed that.

I think one of the strengths of the exercise is that you get to see the image with the eyes of others. It helps with seeing how your own version could have been improved.
Rex

I totally agree with Hector Davila, I seldom act on noise, I think grain is the sign of particular 

This was only my second submission to the 'lockdown' challenge and I did not find it so difficult.  Mine is 908 and am pleased that in my humble opinion, it compares favourably with many of the others.

I made a number of versions, adjusting with too much complexity.  My final version was opened and adjusted in ACR and a opened in PS as a Smart Object.  Copied and opened in ACR again to address the colour/brightness of the seated faces, then painted in to the base layer.  Also made a curves adjustment to darken the paving and foliage, again, painted in to those areas.  I didn't totally neutralize the colour in the table clothes as this is  essentially a tungsten illuminated scene and I feel needs a bit of that warmth.

I also applied Noiseware Pro at about 25% to reduce the grain, but again, I am not a big fan.  Film has an texture that I find more appealing the the blend smoothness of digital.  Overall, I prefer my skin tones to the par version, but concede that the table detail in the par is considerably better.

There is one aspect of all the challenges that interest me.  As I understand it, generally, we try to keep the histogram as smooth as possible; working and saving in jpg inevitably breaks the file structure and this can be seen in the histogram.  As the original, albeit a jpg, many of my correction attempts have resulted in a 'toothed' histogram which looks OK on screen / printed for the family album, but probably would not passed a detailed analysis.  So how important in these challenges, is retaining a good histogram?

Toodle pip

(Another) Rex
--
What if the hokey cokey IS what it's all about??

This photo presents a question of preference, a technical problem, and a challenge perhaps best ignored.  The matter of preference is, of course, how light to make the scene.  My version (904) is among the darkest.  I've been lucky enough to have dinner or drinks in a number of Greek restaurant gardens and patrios.  They've all been softly lighted.  That's how I remember them, how I like to remember them, and perhaps how the Petropouleas family would like to remember their reunion dinner.  But, as my grandmother often said, "'De gustibs non disputandum est,' said the old lady as she kissed the cow."

The technical issue was what to do about the mixed lighting.  The flash brightly lighting the people on the left is much cooler than the presumably incandescent lighting of the head table and background.  If I'd paid more attention to correcting this earlier in my processing, I think gradients adjusting highlights and termperature, and perhaps tint, would be the way to go.  But by the time I got around to this, time was short and I limited myself to several local adjustments tinkering with the problem.  No points there.

The challenge is the lights under the roof shining into the picture.  If I asked people who don't pixel peep as a way of life what was wrong with the picture, I'd be surprised if any of them would notice the mixed lighting or be troubled by it.  And they'd probably be all across the spectrum as to how bright the lighting should be.  But I'd bet a lot of them would say, "Can you do something about those two lights?"  I briefly tried taking them out of the picture, but I was stymied by the halos.  Only one person (903) persevered with that approach.  The results were better than mine, but not really successful in my view.  So I tried instead to reduce the prominence of the lights.  I darkened the halos, and reduced the size of the lights themselves (using content aware fill in Photoshop, with some additional ad hoc adjustments).  The success of this approach is a matter of degree, but IMHO it's better than the oginal.  I was surprised that no one but 903 and me (904) apparently paid any attention fo this issue.

This was a good challenge.  Not to sound forlorn, but I hope I get to go to Greece again.

Bill Iverson

I agree with most but not all of the posted comments and find that the issues were particularly well stated by John Lund.

I agree with Gerald Bakker that this image doesn’t show PPW to its best advantage. The ordering of these case studies is deliberate. In Monument Valley, PPW gave the biggest advantage of any of the ten we’ll be looking at. It is sensible to bracket it with Colosseum and Toast to Greece, where PPW is not much of a factor. Our last three studies will not absolutely require PPW for best results, but will offer opportunities to use certain features of it to advantage.

As to whether this is one of the hardest exercises, I guess I agree but am not certain. For sure there are more opportunities to go wrong here than with Monument Valley, which accounts for why we have more outright bad versions this time. We probably don’t have quite so many really good ones, either, because there are so many priorities to juggle. Still, I find nearly a dozen first-rate efforts among those posted.

The really bad mistakes were somewhat as I expected and somewhat not. Everybody agrees that there is a huge lighting imbalance and that the head table starts out much more orange than the left side. Also, that there is a fair amount of digital noise.

This brings up the question of what we would have seen if we had been present at this scene. We all know that the human eye is more adaptable to strange lighting than a camera is. We would move both the overall scene and its right side more toward uniformity, and specifically more toward like what we would see under sunlight.

Of course, we wouldn’t get quite to sunlight. So I disagree with John Gillespie that #912 and #904 represent what we would have seen in real life. We would have adjusted to make the scene lighter. And that’s at the time: months later we’dprobably remember it as having been even lighter than that.

No matter how adjustable our visual system, however, we can’t ignore a lighting variation as violent as at the head table. Yes, we don’t perceive it as strongly as a camera does, but we can’t ignore it altogether. It follows that anybody who decides they are going to blow that cast off the face of the earth is making a big mistake. For sure there are ways to make it less offensive without obliterating it completely, and we found some good ones.

It follows also that the individual who decided that the large lights above the front table were distracting and deleted them shouldn’t have done so. They help explain why the lighting is so strange. Far better to take the view of Bill Iverson that they can be attractively reduced without eliminating them. I also point out that certain people were able to preserve strong detailing in the candles, whereas others made them indistinguishable from glasses of water. I say that obvious candlelight helps explain the scene and should be preserved.

Similarly, the noise. I am sympathetic with Hector and Roberto when they say it is a natural part of the image. But I can’t go as far as to say it should be ignored. It certainly isn’t desirable, so any sharpening etc. that makes it more pronounced is bad. If there’s a convenient way to reduce it undetectably so much the better, but anyone who is determined to make the skintone as perfectly smooth as if it had been shot in a professional studio is out of his mind. It brings back the Panama 1978 study. The original had a texture imparted in the photofinishing. Some of us did a good job of making it less offensive, but those who insisted that it totally disappear failed miserably.

What mistakes did I expect more of? Well, there was a lot of hand retouching and some of it was in the faces, or in other areas that draw attention. Normally I’d expect some obvious hamhandedness, but by and large what people did wasn’t detectable.

John Gillespie is right when he says that this is likely a warm summer evening and will be remembered as such. Therefore we will tend to prefer a warmer look in the fleshtones. But we also face the question of how much to lighten the scene and things start to get more complicated. John seems to see a clear distinction between those trying to make a night scene out of it and those looking for something happier. There’s some truth to this because certain people tried to have it both ways. They made rather dark fleshtones with strongly red skin. That doesn’t work. Darkness implies grayness.

For sure we can all agree that #919 is a more conservative treatment than #901 (both of which I think are excellent). But envisioning a hard line tough on the many versions that fall between these two extremes. This is not like Monument Valley or Niagara Spray or Cinque Terre, where people were freely admitting they were departing from reality for the sake of a pleasing image. Here, I can imagine that some people will recall the scene as being that portrayed in #901.

There’s only one version here that was deliberately intended to be unrealistic. That one is #920, about which I’ll have more to say in a separate post.

Dan

I will be most anxious to hear Dan's comments...as per his usual views and comments,
But also specifically on the color(s) of the lady's jacket (first lady starting from the far left of the picture).

In my mind too many submitted images show the jacket in two colors: pink and blue or blue and white, or dark/light...and to me it looks blotchy and not what a jacket should look like....and result is viewer attracted to that part of the image. Even the par result seems wrong to me for the jacket.

Mine is #921 and I tried hard to neutralize the discrepancies of blue flash and incandescent lighting. Tho now it looks a bit flat.

I agree with other comments: I see things I should have done differently in my image after seeing all the others and that is very valuable to learn from these efforts.

Doug Schafer

Oh, and I forgot in previous msg:

Several submissions did not correct for chromatic aberrations; most noticeable in pennant flags edges over people in left side of scene.

Doug Schafer