Margulis LAB - Chapter 1
JimW
Registered Users Posts: 333 Major grins
I just got the LAB book (Canyon Conundrum), and so far have read chapter one, as well as Rutt’s excellent synopsis. I know I’m about a year and a half late, but better late than never. After years on the road doing color correction for the printing industry, I’m retiring from press okays (mostly – still have one client), and concentrating on photography. So I’m familiar with cmyk, and starting to learn rgb color correction, when I happened to notice this section of the forum. I’m used to fashion clients going berserk if the seafoam green shirt isn’t perfect, so the lunacy of spending ridiculous amounts of time & effort getting an image just right seems completely normal to me, and I love it.
I started practicing on a recent wedding I shot 2 weeks ago in St Augustine, Florida. This wedding was as close to shooting blind as I’ve ever come. It was in the afternoon, on the beach, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky until the very end. I’ve spent much of my life in dark pressrooms, and live in a small dark NYC apartment, so for me this wedding was like shooting on the surface of the sun. I shot with my dark shades on, and still couldn’t see a thing. I kept saying to myself, “just don’t overexpose”. So I overcompensated a tad.
I think the ambient exposures are okay, but I failed to get enough flash into the subjects on all these “formals” in the sand dunes. I think I’ll have to retire my Lumiquest bounce card thing, as most of the flash never reached the subjects. Oops.
This is the final image of the day, and the sun was behind some thin clouds. First one shows the raw settings with no adjustment.
Then I processed the image through RAW twice, once for the sky (dark) and a second time for everything else. Here are the RAW settings for the “light” version (everything except sky).
I’ve never had to add so much exposure in RAW before, but it appears to have worked.
Then I merged them in PS and masked around the grass and dunes to let the darker sky show through. Next I brightened the sand & people slightly with an rgb curve. Then I used jfriend’s method of lightening on an overlay layer for the flesh only (which I just found in the “dark eyes” thread). Then I curved the sky layer only to add contrast to the clouds & sky, and (still in rgb) got this:
Then I flattened, took it into LAB, and applied the following curves:
and got this.
The clouds are neutral grey, although blue is a little high compared to red & green, but, coming from the printing world I see that as a good thing (insurance for on-press issues). My original goals were to brighten the sand & people a lot, while showing good value in the sky. I paid particular attention to the flesh tones. In this case, I don’t care about being accurate to the scene. The scene was brutally bright and difficult. I just want a nice photo for them. I’m very pleasantly surprised with the amount of improvement I was able to get, and so far have been very impressed with LAB results. In most cases, the LAB versions look almost as if they were (dare I say?) ... backlit (at least as compared to the rgb version). I capture in Adobe RGB, and should note that when I converted these to srgb for uploading, some of the warmth disappeared.
All comments and critiques are most welcome. I want to learn, and hope to keep reading and following Rutt’s synopses of the chapters. I really want to add LAB processing to my toolbox of processing tricks, and am enthused by the support here. Thanks very much for this opportunity. (Have I made this post too long?)
Jim
I started practicing on a recent wedding I shot 2 weeks ago in St Augustine, Florida. This wedding was as close to shooting blind as I’ve ever come. It was in the afternoon, on the beach, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky until the very end. I’ve spent much of my life in dark pressrooms, and live in a small dark NYC apartment, so for me this wedding was like shooting on the surface of the sun. I shot with my dark shades on, and still couldn’t see a thing. I kept saying to myself, “just don’t overexpose”. So I overcompensated a tad.
I think the ambient exposures are okay, but I failed to get enough flash into the subjects on all these “formals” in the sand dunes. I think I’ll have to retire my Lumiquest bounce card thing, as most of the flash never reached the subjects. Oops.This is the final image of the day, and the sun was behind some thin clouds. First one shows the raw settings with no adjustment.
Then I processed the image through RAW twice, once for the sky (dark) and a second time for everything else. Here are the RAW settings for the “light” version (everything except sky).
I’ve never had to add so much exposure in RAW before, but it appears to have worked.
Then I merged them in PS and masked around the grass and dunes to let the darker sky show through. Next I brightened the sand & people slightly with an rgb curve. Then I used jfriend’s method of lightening on an overlay layer for the flesh only (which I just found in the “dark eyes” thread). Then I curved the sky layer only to add contrast to the clouds & sky, and (still in rgb) got this:
Then I flattened, took it into LAB, and applied the following curves:
and got this.
The clouds are neutral grey, although blue is a little high compared to red & green, but, coming from the printing world I see that as a good thing (insurance for on-press issues). My original goals were to brighten the sand & people a lot, while showing good value in the sky. I paid particular attention to the flesh tones. In this case, I don’t care about being accurate to the scene. The scene was brutally bright and difficult. I just want a nice photo for them. I’m very pleasantly surprised with the amount of improvement I was able to get, and so far have been very impressed with LAB results. In most cases, the LAB versions look almost as if they were (dare I say?) ... backlit (at least as compared to the rgb version). I capture in Adobe RGB, and should note that when I converted these to srgb for uploading, some of the warmth disappeared.
All comments and critiques are most welcome. I want to learn, and hope to keep reading and following Rutt’s synopses of the chapters. I really want to add LAB processing to my toolbox of processing tricks, and am enthused by the support here. Thanks very much for this opportunity. (Have I made this post too long?)
Jim
I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap.
http://www.jimwhitakerphotography.com/
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