Help making a rainbow pop?

cdonovan · June 12, 2007

I was at a shoot last night. A gal is saying goodbye to her old mare on Friday, she's full of arthritis and is on the highest dose of meds two times a day.:cry She's decided it's time to let her go.

We did a number of different shots and then let her out to pasture with her buddies, I followed and we looked up and saw a rainbow.......how extremly extremly fitting as the ol saying goes that animals cross rainbow bridge and wait for us until it's time to meet again.

:

I got the shot, she stood right under neath it, now I need some help bumping up the colors and really making this pop....can you folks help me please edit it as you wish..and please just help me with the steps you took to get it to that state thanks in advance! :smooch

pathfinder · June 12, 2007

No piccie seen. Nor did you link one in your post apparently.

Augmenting rainbows in images is an excellent place to learn the value of the LAB color space.

I wrote a thread about rainbows and LAB color space here

in my review of Chapter 11 Retouching in Lab Colorspace in D Margulis "The Canyon Conundrum"

Editing of images is discussed in FInishing School, this thread is concerned with shooting technique. I am moving this to Finishing School for further comments by other posters.

cdonovan · June 12, 2007

Thank you for that! I realized that I didn't have my external linking on! Hopefully you can see it now! Thanks for your help...I am going to go and take a peek at your tutorial!!!:D

jfriend · June 12, 2007

cdonovan wrote:

I was at a shoot last night. A gal is saying goodbye to her old mare on Friday, she's full of arthritis and is on the highest dose of meds two times a day.:cry She's decided it's time to let her go.

We did a number of different shots and then let her out to pasture with her buddies, I followed and we looked up and saw a rainbow.......how extremly extremly fitting as the ol saying goes that animals cross rainbow bridge and wait for us until it's time to meet again. :

I got the shot, she stood right under neath it, now I need some help bumping up the colors and really making this pop....can you folks help me please edit it as you wish..and please just help me with the steps you took to get it to that state thanks in advance! :smooch

Here's a quick one I did.

cdonovan · June 12, 2007

Thanks John, can you tell me how you did that please!:D

jfriend · June 12, 2007

cdonovan wrote:

Thanks John, can you tell me how you did that please!:D

I'll write up some steps when I have time later, but can you make a larger version of the image available? The one you posted has really bad JPEG compression in the sky and when we darken the sky it makes a lot more work to make it look decent. It would be a lot easier to start with a higher resolution file. You can either enable originals on the gallery it's in (I tried and they are not enabled now) or you can make a "test" gallery, enable originals in it, make it private so it doesn't show on your home page, then copy this image over to that new gallery (perhaps this would be the only image in that gallery) and then tell us where we can find it.

cdonovan · June 12, 2007

The photos have already been purchased so I just turned on or opened up the originals for you...hope that helps! I uploaded the full size jpeg that I have so it should work....I hope!!!

pathfinder · June 12, 2007

CD,

I did not have access to any image but the one posted here on dgrin, so it is less than the best that can be done due to the limited data within it.

I saved it to my desktop and then opened it in PSCS3 in ARC 4.1 as a jpg, where I set the color balance by clicking the white balance eye dropper on the horses rear flank. I then opened the image in Photoshop using the RAW sliders as needed to prevent loss of highlights or shadow detail, and found some white and black points to set up the curves in RGB.

I then duplicated the image with CTRL-J and converted to the LAB color space for both layers in my Layers palette. I used Select>Color Range to select the sky and the rainbow and did not select the green forground. I had to use the Lasso tool to deselect the horse that was selected with the Select>Color command that grabbed the sky.The edge of the selection of the sky was refined with the Select>Refine Edge command

I then duplicated the sky/rainbow to a third layer and blended with the second layer with a Multiply Blend. That was much better but still not enough color in the rainbow, so I CTRL-J'd the sky/rainbow selection a second time and Multiply Blended it again. Now there was too much color and the sky was too dark, so I reduced the opacity to about 20% and got this, after flattening the layers and converting back to sRGB.

I have the psd file and can email it to you if that wil help you follow what I have done. It would be easy to darken the sky further with the opacity slider. You could also steepen the a and b curve in LAB to create even further color saturation in the rainbow if you felt it was needed.

jfriend · June 12, 2007

Some steps

cdonovan wrote:

Thanks John, can you tell me how you did that please!:D

First, there are probably simpler ways to do this edit than the one I picked. The wonder of Photoshop is there are always at least ten ways to do something, but this is the way that worked for me.

Second, if you haven't already, you should read the Chapter 1 writeup from Dan Margulis' LAB book. I use that basic technique here to enhance color. Then read, the Chapter 9 writeup that discusses creating masks from channels as I use that technique here to isolate the sky.

Here's what I did:

Figure out what you want to do to the image. For me, I decided I needed to do four things:
- Remove some noise (there's a lot of noise in the sky)
- Darken the sky to help the rainbow stand out more
- Enhance the colors in the sky to also make the rainbow stand out more
- Adjust overall warmth of the image
I made a duplicate layer and then I used Photoshop's noise reduction to take some of the noise out of the sky. This image isn't so much about fine detail so it seems OK to turn the noise removal settings up pretty high
I experimented with various ways to isolate the sky from the rest of the image. A luminosity mask (based on image brightness) is one way. In the RGB version of the image, the blue channel looks like it has the best contrast between the sky and trees. In the LAB version of the image, the A channel looks negative in the trees and positive in the sky, but right around the sky/tree edge, the transition isn't very clean. In the CMYK version of the image, the Yellow channel has great contrast between the sky and trees. So, I picked the yellow channel to be the basis of a mask
To get a clean version of the yellow channel, I duplicated the image. Then converted the duplicate to CMYK
Switch to view the Yellow channel, select all and copy to the clipboard
Go back to your original image. Convert it to LAB.
Create a curves adjustment layer over the noise reduced layer. Pull the curve way down in the middle until you like the brightness of the sky. Ignore what happens to the trees and horse.
Now Alt-click on the mask for the curves adjustment layer and then paste in the Yellow channel(which is mostly black on the trees and white on the sky). Alt-click on the mask again to restore the image view (so you are no longer viewing just the mask).
You should immediately see some of the brightness come back in the trees because of this mask.
Now select the mask again by just clicking on it (not Alt-click).
Do Image/Adjustments/Curves to apply a curve to the mask.
Bring in the end points on the curve to sharpen the effect of the mask. We want to drive the dark parts of the mask to black and the light parts to white and still leave a smooth transition in the middle for the boundary between trees and sky. Use the image as your guide.
Select a black soft brush and paint black on the mask over the horse to block the curve from the horse.
Now fine tune the curve adjustment layer until you like the brightness of the sky and until the boundary between sky and trees seems clean.
How create a new curves adjustment layer and select the A channel. When creating the new adjustment layer, select [X] Use Previous Layer to Create a Clipping Mask. This will cause the changes to inherit the mask for the sky and only apply to the sky.
Push both end-points in on the A channel until they both read 54.
Repeat the process to create another curve adjustment layer, select the B channel and push in both ends until the read 62.
You should now see substantially enhanced color in the sky and rainbow.
Flatten your image and convert back to RGB
At tihis point you can decide if you like the overal tone/color of the image. I decided I wanted it a little warmer (kind of like a sunset sky) so I removed a little blue (which adds yellow) with another curve in order to warm it up a bit.

Here's what my layer's palette looks like while still in LAB (before converting back to RGB).

Help making a rainbow pop?

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