The black dog

rutt

I've always had trouble capturing my black lab. For one thing she is camera shy (how does she know?)

But more fundemental is the issue of contrast. Black is black and you want it to be real black, not some second cousin.

Before:



After:



I borrowed a trick from my color correction guru, Dan Margulis. I made to separate conversions to CMYK, one with light black generation and the second with heavy black generation. Then I pasted the black channel from the heavy BG version into the normal CMYK conversion. This gave me a much heftier black channel. After this a little work with curves and sharpening (on the black channel) and voila!

Dan's example uses a fashion shot of model in a black lace dress. Of course, in that case the pattern of the dress is the central focus.

pathfinder

rutt wrote:

I've always had trouble capturing my black lab. For one thing she is camera shy (how does she know?)

But more fundemental is the issue of contrast. Black is black and you want it to be real black, not some second cousin.

Before:



After:



I borrowed a trick from my color correction guru, Dan Margulis. I made to separate conversions to CMYK, one with light black generation and the second with heavy black generation. Then I pasted the black channel from the heavy BG version into the normal CMYK conversion. This gave me a much heftier black channel. After this a little work with curves and sharpening (on the black channel) and voila!

Dan's example uses a fashion shot of model in a black lace dress. Of course, in that case the pattern of the dress is the central focus.

Interesting approach to an overexposed image - When I bring image #1 into Photshop and examine the color data in the Info palette I see numberrs of a medium gray for the dogs head - eg 120, 130, 125 RGB These numbers should be around 240 or so to be black - This indicates to me that the original picture was overexposed as a light metered shot might be trying to expose a black object as 18% grey. Also the dogs teeth show no detail again suggesting overexposure.
You might just duplicate the first image with ctrl-J and change the blend mode to multiply for more color depth in the overexposed image - simpler and faster than black channel sleights of hand. I understand you are trying to keep more data in the black channel without losing the highlights - but overexposure blows out both anyway....

Here is the first image of the dog with the overlying color Info palette taken from the white spot I painted to indicate where the color data was sampled from.

rutt

pathfinder wrote:

This indicates to me that the original picture was overexposed as a light metered shot might be trying to expose a black object as 18% grey.

That sounds like a good explanation for why it's hard to take good pictures of black dogs. I'll try the approach you suggest and see what I get. Beging able to sharpen on the heavy black channel was important to the result I got, but I'd like to get the detail in the mouth back.

pathfinder

rutt wrote:

That sounds like a good explanation for why it's hard to take good pictures of black dogs. I'll try the approach you suggest and see what I get. Beging able to sharpen on the heavy black channel was important to the result I got, but I'd like to get the detail in the mouth back.

Here in this image (I made from your first image) I made a duplicate layer with ctrl-J and then changed the blend mode to multiply to increase the color of the dog - but the backround was still too pale - so I selected the background via Color Select and did another duplicate of just this selected area of background and then blended again with multiply and this is the result better color of the mouth and teeth and background -

My monitor at work is not color calibrated and I just used the ~20kB fiile on dgrin so it might be better with the full sized file - but I would start by adjusting your camera to not overexpose the dog - just like snow comes out grey because it is underexposed with automatic cameras.

Put your dog in the sun and shoot at f16 and 1/ISO on the manual setting - is a good rule to start with - adjust from there

fish

my shot at it. ick...got noisy teeth because i was lazy and resaved a jpeg. consider whitening toothpaste?

rutt

fish wrote:

my shot at it. ick...got noisy teeth because i was lazy and resaved a jpeg. consider whitening toothpaste?

Her teeth are yellow, which is too bad. I forced them to white and in the process blew out the tounge. I thought this was a reasonable trade off. But perhaps it's possible to do better.

I still like the fur on my version best. There is a blue - cyan cast in the original that I neutralized and which the multiply move makes worse (it also makes the teeth more yellow.) Being able to shapen on the heavy black layer avoids the "wet" look you get if you just multiply layers in RGB and then sharpen all the channels in RGB.

I tried playing with the L curve in LAB and was also able to move closer to correct exposure.

But using the heavy black channel in the light CMYK version had a number of advantages - by increasing the black, it tended to neutralize and deepen the black; and it made for great sharpening of the fur.

The originals as well as a simple version of the multiply idea are all online on smugmug here.

Thanks for the multiply idea, though, it sure was easier then the CMYK trick. I'll keep it in mind for next time. But I really loved the insight about autometering and black objects.

cletus

Is this too much???


If so, maybe this one?

cmr164

fish wrote:

my shot at it. ick...got noisy teeth because i was lazy and resaved a jpeg. consider whitening toothpaste?

How about just taking the first overexposed shot and applying a gamma correction of .5 (in 'xv').

lynnma

rutt wrote:

I've always had trouble capturing my black lab. For one thing she is camera shy (how does she know?)

But more fundemental is the issue of contrast. Black is black and you want it to be real black, not some second cousin.

Before:



After:



I borrowed a trick from my color correction guru, Dan Margulis. I made to separate conversions to CMYK, one with light black generation and the second with heavy black generation. Then I pasted the black channel from the heavy BG version into the normal CMYK conversion. This gave me a much heftier black channel. After this a little work with curves and sharpening (on the black channel) and voila!

Dan's example uses a fashion shot of model in a black lace dress. Of course, in that case the pattern of the dress is the central focus.

Lovely doggie Rutt... I'm interested to know what settings you shot at... a photographer friend of mind who uses film told me if it's white go whiter if it's black go darker... referring to exposure of course. Just a thought.
Lynn

rutt

How's this?
I took the multiply idea, then moved into CMYK and made the dog actually be black and generally steepend the curves. I still think my first post worked best on the fur, BTW, but that's splitting hairs.

Then I used the dodge tool on the M and Y channels separately to restore detail in the mouth. I don't usually like doing this, but maybe this time...

cletus

rutt wrote:

I took the multiply idea, then moved into CMYK and made the dog actually be black and generally steepend the curves. I still think my first post worked best on the fur, BTW, but that's splitting hairs.

Then I used the dodge tool on the M and Y channels separately to restore detail in the mouth. I don't usually like doing this, but maybe this time...

That's starting to look very good rutt. I find it interesting that you're moving images over to CMYK to help with adjustments. That's something that I've never done. Do you have any recomendations for where I can look to read up on the subject (books, links, etc.)?

soup

you have to keep in mind you are not taking a photo of black velvet under controlled lighting, and the dogs fur has texture, and shades, it isnt jet black like acrylic paint.

the focus should be on making the dog look true to the eye.
its obvious in the original image that it's over exposed, however there are areas that are already jet black - a spot by the eyebrow area for instance.

i did a quick curves adjustment, and slightly sharpened it.

soup

and to get rid of the BG so to speak

wxwax

After reading this thread, I submit that I'm not the only one with a bad monitor. Some of the 'fixes' look terrible!

rutt

I don't think this looks better than my original correction. In fact, the dog looks wet. She really isn't shiny at all.

Making her fur really black but realistically textured is what I struggled with at first and why I was so pleased with the two CMYK separation idea. Now I think I know how to combine that with recovering the detail in her mouth. Perhaps I'll give it a shot. But I'll have to start from scratch, since I performed unnatural acts to get the teeth white at first. Now I think that was a mistake, since they really aren't white.

rutt

cletus wrote:

That's starting to look very good rutt. I find it interesting that you're moving images over to CMYK to help with adjustments. That's something that I've never done. Do you have any recomendations for where I can look to read up on the subject (books, links, etc.)?

Oh my, yes. Read Professional Photoshop by Dan Margulis. It's the color correction masterpiece. Not only that, it's even well written and fun to read.

Dan is controversial, but there isn't anything else out there that makes as much sense and covers so much ground just on color correction/enhancement.

There is already a dgrin thread on the topic here. Be sure to read my posts as I was Dan's main advocate in this thread.

soup

well i do - to each his own

print them

zero-zero

I'm putting my money on Rutt's image, no contest. Besides, dissimilar black generation is such an elegant solution to the problem it pains me to see it swept aside without further thought by some.:cry

And I certainly believe Waxy is right!

cletus

rutt wrote:

Oh my, yes. Read Professional Photoshop by Dan Margulis. It's the color correction masterpiece. Not only that, it's even well written and fun to read.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

soup

not throwing the CMYK idea aside, simpler sometimes is better, is all.

rutt

soup wrote:

not throwing the CMYK idea aside, simpler sometimes is better, is all.

That idea comes directly from Chapter 7 of Professional Photoshop by Dan Margulis. The point isn't really fixing the underexposure; as a lot of people have pointed out, there are simpler fixes for this. The point is to bring out the details in the shawdows. In Dan's book, the target is a black dress with a lace pattern in a fashion shot. Here, it's the texture of the dog's fur. Just fixing the underexposure helps a lot, but it leaves something on the table.

On the other hand, the underexposure of the dog's mouth is a real issue and I didn't address it originally because I was too focused on the fur and the learning excersise.

Here is a my "final" attempt:


Here is the "simple 8 step procedure":

1. Duplicate image
2. Move image into "standard" CMYK
3. Move image duplicate into "custon CMYK", 100% black limit, meduim
4. Replace black channel in image with black channel from duplicate
5. Adjust CMYK cureves as usual to remove cast, and steepen curves, especially black. This has the side effect of fixing fur underexposure and total ink maximus.
6. Use burn tool with magenta channel selected to restore detail to the tounge. (very low opacity - 12%)
7. Use burn tool with yellow channel selected to restore detail to teath. (opacity ditto)
8. Unsharp mask black channel with small (.8) radius and large amount (500%)

Granted, this is a lot of work (and exploring the options to find the right values makes it a lot of work.) And the results are only a little better than the results from the simpler techniques, at least on my monitor. But the difference is there and shows up drammatically in large (12x18) epson 2200 prints.

Stump Speech: Dan Margulis (my color correction guru) does a job I wasn't even aware of until I started to make my own color prints of digital photos. I think the name of the job is prepress professional but iit is also done in the darkrooms of proshops by people with spectometers and microscopes. The tools have changed, but the job is the same -- to make prints look better. These people contribute greatly to the end product; without their work, photos in National Geographic, Vogue, Photography Today, and old Life magazines wouldn't be nearly as good. Dan is also a master at salvaging bad photos. The same skills that can make a great photograph realize it's potential can also bring a scan of a faded print back to life.

Anyway, this is paintaking work, but with practice and mastery, one becomes more effecient. As I saind above, most of the time goes into exploring and learning. Many pictures don't require the kind of work that this one did, but just fall into one of a few standard formulas.

Disclaimer: I'm not a very advanced student of this craft. I'm also a photographer, which Dan views as a major handicap. No doubt Dan himself can do much better with this very image. (I tried to get him to do so, but he threw it back at me as an excercise.)

Dan is much more persusave, knowlegable, and cogent than I am. Tune in to him here.