Project 1 - Karel Rasovsky

1 - Levels & Curves

I started my project with two family pictures, both with very different problems:

(1) – “two cousins” was taken in a wine-garden at night. Issue: overexposed foreground set against a dark, underexposed background.

(2)– “inflight entertainment” was taken aboard an airliner. Issue: underexposed, grayish, flat picture.

Both Levels and Curves are extremely powerful tools, each with unique strengths. I edited both pictures through Levels and Curves and confirmed what the books already say. Levels achieved superior results with (2), which was largely in need of increasing contrast and brightness. Curves did a better job with (1), which required decreasing the levels of stark highlights and shadows. Conclusion: Levels is better at increasing contrast, Curves is better at decreasing the contrast.

Levels

For now, I prefer the Levels command. As a user, I feel Levels is initially easier to grasp. I also liked the sense of precise control when setting the values of highlights, shadows and midtones. Worth honorable mention are the “presets” inside Levels – e.g. “midtones brighter”, ”midtones darker”. Easy to step through, and when you find a fitting choice, they were producing consistently good results on my photos. Good enough for everyday type of corrections. For the sake of our project, I experimented with custom settings for optimal results. See more below.

Curves

The Curves command is very powerful but also more difficult to tame. It has taken me a while to grasp the concept behind the luminance curve, and what I am actually doing with it (beyond seeing a changing image in front of me). Adjusting the two high/low points on the luminance curve definitely takes some practice. After some trial and error, I managed to accomplish a pretty good high/low balance. This opened up more brilliant and vivid colors in the photo. Bringing up the Histogram palette was very helpful in identifying the offending color “spike”, and then editing that particular color channel for best results.

Overall, Curves did wonders of pulling out details from the shadows I didn’t know existed in my “two cousins” photo. The colors were still a bit off, which was easily fixed mainly through a subsequent Hue/Saturation round. In my particular case, the picture also required further softening of highlights/shadow transitions through the Shadow/Highlights command. More about these experiments below.

2 - Variations

Since Variations is really best suited for remedy of “color cast”, I chose an old, low-quality photo with a reddish/orange cast. Can this actually be improved? It turned out, Variations was up to the task. Here is my sequence of steps:

· Edited through Variations: problem color was Red à added more Cyan (complementary to Red) across Shadows, Midtones, Highlights. Pretty decent improvement.

· Some fine-tuning of Saturation helped even more

· Then mainly Hue/Saturation to optimize overall coloring effect

The Variations tool is a good first “quick fix” to improve hopeless cast color images. It did a good job reducing the red cast in my image and re-balancing the color mix. But no amount of tools could remedy the overall low-quality of the original photo.

3 – Fine-tuning Images

Color channels

My formerly “flat” picture of “two cousins” benefitted most from lightening up the R, B channels. Important: always go back to the RGB level and re-adjust gamma across all channels for improved results. After experimenting, I set my RGB midtone Input Levels to a whopping 1.30 across channels with great impact. The image lightened up without suffering a washed-out look. Still, some color was lost in the process – on to Saturation/Hue!

Saturation & Hue

After editing with Levels or Curves, this was an important next step improving the color intensity of my pictures. Experimenting with custom setting, I was able to achieve visually dramatic improvement, bringing out more color in both photos.

Vibrance

I usually experimented with Vibrance after editing with Hue/Saturation. Changing the vibrance settings did not produce discernable improvements for my photos used in this project.

Brightness & Contrast

Straightforward, easy, effective. Adjustments brought more light into my photo without distorting the natural light conditions of the scene.

Shadow/highlights

This is a very flexible and effective tool for improving shadow/highlight problems. It requires some practice to strike the best balance of amount/tone/radius in the shadows & highlight dialog box. But it was time well spent. Always go back and re-adjust “amount in shadow”, after you run through both shadow & highlights settings. It made a huge difference in my picture. A high Radius setting smoothed and softened highlights/shadows/midtones beyond expectations. When it was all said and done, I got remarkable results – a picture with details in the shadows, and with the original color balance unchanged.

Gradient Map

Well, my original was a color image, so how about creating a gray scale image out of it? The selection of preset gradients was overwhelming, but I chose the traditional “sepia” tone, transforming my color image into a soft black/white scene. Played with the color stops, adjusted opacity. Wouldn’t you know it, the default setting turned out the best. This was fun!

Other tools/combinations

The “automatic image correction” tools produced great results for me, in at least one instance. In this case, I used them in a bit unconventional way. First, I edited my “inflight entertainment” image with Layers, with subsequent refinements via Hues/Saturation etc. Finally, processed with “auto contrast”, “auto color” and “auto tone”. The “auto tone” had the magical effect, in that it significantly improved tone balance of the picture.

4 - SWS Upload (web-optimized files)

Three originals:

inflight_entertainment_original.jpg

two_cousins_original.jpg

tree_original.jpg

Intermediate edits:

inflight_entertainment_brightnesscontrast.psd

inflight_entertainment_colorchannels.psd

inflight_entertainment_gradientmap.psd

inflight_entertainment_huesaturation.psd

Final images:

final_inflight_entertainment.psd

final_two_cousins.psd

final_tree.psd

5 – Bottom Line

My first two pics – “inflight entertainment” and “two cousins” – had high-pixel count (Nikon D80). Although both had quite severe problems, Photoshop was able to transform them into great images. I see the potential of the Shadow/Highlights tool for many of my photos, where the commercial flash came up short. This class is my first encounter with Photoshop, hope to develop it into a practical skill from here.

Enjoy the journey!

Karel