3 channel LAB HIRALOAM with an HDR image
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
Above is before/after of David (Devbobo) Parry's beautiful HDR image posted in the Whipping Post. When I first saw this, I thought, "He's nailed it; nothing much I can do for it."
But then I thought I'd try out a recent Margulis idea: 3 channel HIRALOAM in LAB and that's what you are seeing above (and all that you are seeing.)
- Convert to LAB, duplicate layer
- HIRALOAM with all three channels selected. I this case, the original was low res, so the radius was just relatively low, about 7. Full res, it would have been more like 30 or so, I'm guessing. Left amount very high for now: 70%
- Convert to RGB without flattening. Duplicate the HIRALOAM layer and set blending mode of one layer to darken and the other to lighten.
- Decrease opacity of lighten layer to about 50%
- Duplicate background layer below the two HIRALOAM layers and merge these three layers.
- Play with opacity of the merged layer. Maybe 80%?
- Done
HIRALOAM is a local contrast enhancement. So one of the effects of this move was to make the lightest parts of the image a little lighter and thus establish true light points in the surf reflections. It also intensified the dark points in the rocks. It did this without losing detail in either area, because I was careful with my opacities.
It also brought out detail in the rocks and sand as might be expected for HIRALOAM sharpening.
The unconventional thing is the use of all three LAB channels for the HIRALOAM USM which it also intensified the colors in sky, particularly the red of the clouds. You may need to download and look at it in PS to see this in my final version (this is a case where my browser shows the image considerably ligher than PS does.) But let's look at the HIRALOAM layer at full opacity and amount:
Here you can easily see the local saturation in the sky, you can see how the move will lighten the surf. You can even tell that it will lighten too much relative to darkening.
With a full res original, it would probably be worth sharpening the L channel separately form the A+B channels in order to get richer colors even in the far highlights, where I cut the opacity for this particular attempt...
If not now, when?
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Comments
I love what you have done here
I will give this a go on the original a bit later. I am considering getting this in a large canvas, but when I see your changes first.
Cheers mate,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
Thanks and kudos to the great work!
Jealously,
Scott
I know so much more about HIRALOAM than I did when I wrote the LAB book chapter summary, the portrait technique summary (which illustrates a HIRALOAM step) and even when Nik wrote his chapter summary of PP5E. I've been meaning to write something. But for now you can see this post.
I know so much more about HIRALOAM than I did when I wrote the LAB book chapter summary, the portrait technique summary (which illustrates a HIRALOAM step) and even when Nik wrote his chapter summary of PP5E. I've been meaning to write something. But for now you can see this post.
technique is great. Thank you for sharing. I have it
bootmarked to try it myself once my Pantone Huey Pro arrives.
― Edward Weston
Pantone Huey. Slowly I turned. Step by step. Inch by inch...
Seriously. Monitor calibration is overrated. It's neither necessary nor sufficient for good color correction and image enhancement. What's important is having non-broken calibration. If you are in the ballpark (and the Huey [slowly I turned] never got me there) then you must learn to measure color values to get the best possible results (and in this case I started with a great image and so we are really talking about best possible, not just OK.) And the technique I finally settled on really doesn't require very exact calibration. I relied on the very exaggerated HIRALOAM layer before I turned down the opacity to know what I was doing. There is nothing subtle about that.
I've posted a lot about this. Here's an example. But even after this post the thread turned to the issue of how best to calibrate. Someday soon I'm going to write a manifesto. :rutt
Sharpen only the L and you'll make no color changes at all.
Thanks for the links Rutt.....Will post back after some reading!
Scott
I plan to buy the Photoshop Lab color book. I actually bought it once, but was ripped on ebay.....
Anyhow would you also recommend buying Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition)?
Thanks,
Scott
Way off target. See: this post. And please post responses there not here.