Isolation help

scottV

Anybody have an idea how I can tone down the bright orange tower somewhat?

CWSkopec

Wow!! Very cool image, Scott!

If you shot this one in Raw, you could reprocess the raw file to get an exposure you like on the tower... then layer it over the current image and mask away the sky to reveal the sky in this version.

It's slightly time consuming, but not very hard... Oh... But that's assuming you have Photoshop... what Post Processing software do you have access to?

scottV

thanks chris.
It is 16 raw files combined in PS. I tried processing a slice to get the tower to look somewhat normal but then gave up on the masking late last night. Tried the wand and also color select but the edges were looking crappy. Trying to avoid doing it by hand, especially with those thin wires.
Since the color is so different from the background was hoping there would be an easier way to separate it.

Richard

scottV wrote:

Anybody have an idea how I can tone down the bright orange tower somewhat

Assuming you have Photoshop, this one is relatively easy in LAB mode. The tower is very bright in the B channel, so you could do a curve adjustment layer to lower the lightness, then use the Blend If sliders on the B channel to restrict the effect to the yellows. It will probably affect the cables too, but you could use a simple painted mask if you want them unchanged.

jjbong

Richard wrote:

Assuming you have Photoshop, this one is relatively easy in LAB mode. The tower is very bright in the B channel, so you could do a curve adjustment layer to lower the lightness, then use the Blend If sliders on the B channel to restrict the effect to the yellows. It will probably affect the cables too, but you could use a simple painted mask if you want them unchanged.

You might also/instead want to desaturate the tower, which can also be done with curves in LAB in the A and B channels. You can just play around with the L, A, and B curves to get the effect you want.

jjbong

Following Richard's suggestion with my addition (darkening and desaturating the tower with LAB curves and Blend-If, then quickly painting out a mask of the power lines):



Maybe not exactly the effect you were looking for, but you can tweak the curves to get lighter/darker, more/less saturated. The whole thing took a few minutes.

The LAB curves:



The Blend-If on the curves layer:



The mask is really easy. Usually, with this technique (using Blend-If in LAB to limit the effect of the layer, in this case a curves adjustment layer), the mask is not very precise. I just painted black into it over the area of the power lines. I didn't have to isolate them exactly, since the Blend-If got rid of anything bordering them, except for the tower.

pathfinder

I used Color Select + the Refine Edges command, pulled down the curve for the Selection, and desaturated it a bit with the Desaturate brush for this result.... 2 minutes tops!

There are always so many different ways to skin a cat in Photoshop.

jjbong

pathfinder wrote:

There are always so many different ways to skin a cat in Photoshop.

For sure. Nice job (no surprise).

It seems to me that this sort of exercise divides into two types of problems. The first: I want to make this image better, but I don't know what I'm trying to fix, exactly. The second: this is what I'm trying to do, but I don't know how to do it (or how to do it quickly).

ScottV here is clearly of the second type, knowing exactly what he want to accomplish.

But I think a lot of the Photoshop (and related) training/books/whatever focus too much on the how and not enough on the what-do-you-want-to-fix.

pathfinder

Scott said he tried the Color Select but the edges "were looking crappy" I think that is precisely where the Refine Edges can help quite a bit.

The Blend If command can work great also as shown.

My first thought was to just use the Blue channel - inverted as a mask - the yellow will be black in the blue channel and when inverted will be white which will work well as a selection with mask. But when I tried Color Select it seemed to work fine for me.

I use Color Select frequently, second only to the Quick Select tool or Quick Mask, but for this tower, you need to use an automated tool as selecting by hand would get very tedious very fast for me.

I agree that the encyclopedic listing of tools in PS does not seem to be helpful for me. I prefer the "fix that this way" type of exposition myself - more like Kelby than Martin Evening - but that is just me.

Lists of 'HOW' only help if I already know what I want to do first - for myself at least.

Here is the blue channel of the original image, converted to grayscale, and then inverted, back to RGB and saved. A bit of a curve would complete the mask.

scottV

wow, thanks for all the tips. working with channels and especially the lab conversion is something I still need to wrap my head around. will definitely be messing with this pic some more over the weekend.