Before and after

Grumpy_one

I'm going to try to get this thread going of "before and after" shots. I'll start with a couple of mine and give brief descriptions of the pp that took place.
Ok, one for now, can only upload one at a time.
This was one of my first attempts to make a photo "pop". Full tutorial here. What I did in PS was use threshold (image>adjustments>threshold...) and find the whitest point than the blackest point (moving slider) marking those points (shift+left click) then cancel, then apply layered mask's for curves and levels. Merged the layers and did USM at 500, .6 , and threshold of about 5 I believe (from memory...yikes). I did the USM on just the "lightness" channel (image>mode>lab color) then back to RGB mode. I'll post more as I do them. I hope this will be the start of a good learning thread. Cheers

And one other thing, C&C is a must here. If you dont want hurt feelings , check them at the door. What I want to accomplish is 'what can I do, to make this a better picture' type atmoshere. Thanks!

Grumpy_one

Here's one I did today with what I've learned so far..
I did the luminosity layer thing where you drag the rgb layer onto the load button, save the selection as "lights", activate the rgb channel again, go back to the layer channel, do a curve layer (full tutorial here) and then did the "pop" thing where I look for the lightest and darkest spots with thresold (see previos post) then sharpened. I did the sharpen as before, lightness channel in lab color mode. Let me know what you think. Cheers

jjbong

Grumpy_one wrote:

then apply layered mask's for curves and levels.

Not sure what you mean by this (and I didn't find layer masks referenced in the tutorial). Could you clarify?

thegridrunner

wow, very nice... It never occurred to me to do the curves adjustment in layers... I will try that...

Grumpy_one

jjbong wrote:

Not sure what you mean by this (and I didn't find layer masks referenced in the tutorial). Could you clarify?

I might have misspoke, they call it an adjustment layer, it just happens to have a mask and I called it a layered mask. Hope this pic clears it up for you. The mask allows you to do selective processing. If you've never used a mask, check out this tutorial. Here's a pretty good way of using masks in this tutorial. Hope this helps. Cheers

Grumpy_one

thegridrunner wrote:

wow, very nice... It never occurred to me to do the curves adjustment in layers... I will try that...

This is one form of "non" destructive editing. It can always be changed back to original as long as you save it as a .psd file with the layers intact. You can do as many layers as you want. Only trouble is, when you go to do any USM sharpening, it should be the last step of any pp, and the layers should be flattened. Glad to have been some help. Cheers

jjbong

Grumpy_one wrote:

What I want to accomplish is 'what can I do, to make this a better picture' type atmoshere. Thanks!

You've done some good things with the shot. You've set the white and black points, and you've added contrast in some of the places of interest.

But I think there are two things you missed. One is that there's a cold color cast to the shot, which you haven't eliminated. It's easy to see in the ball, which is blue-green, and in the strip on the left side of the uniform. There are also sections of her hair which are blue, which I suppose could be correct, but I assume aren't. If you know what to look for, you can also see it in the face, where the skins tones aren't reasonable. Here are the color samplers I set:

I used some simple curves on a curves adjustment layer set to Color mode (so it changes only color, and not luminosity):

All I did here was to get the ball more or less neutral. As others have pointed out, that often goes much of the way to getting something decent. If you start with this adjustment, and then do what you did, I think you'll end up with something better.

The second thing is harder. You did a nice job of bringing out the detail (contrast) in the ball, but I think the girl's face is a bit too dark. My attempt was to do an L curve in Lab, anchoring the high end of the curve so as not to blow out the detail here. I then did some standard Lab curves to make the colors pop a bit, with this result (your final result is on the left):

There are threads here in this technique, which I'll try to find.

I think the key to any of this is understanding what you want to get out of a shot, and then what tools work to do that. Eliminating color casts should be the first order of business.

Alex Nail

John, whilst I agree there is a slight blue cast int he above image, I prefer the shot before you edited it. I think you have taken the warming and saturation too far in the girls face, she looks like she has fake tan.

Here's a shot I took in the Swiss Alps which took me a very long time to process.

1. Convert Raw into 2 different exposures (trying to recover as much of the cloud as possible)
2. Combine exposures in photoshop with masks. Mask created with a combintion of hand painting, channels and select color range.
3. Clone out main lens flare on new layer this alone took me about 40 minutes
4. Warm and add contrast to the lens flares on the roof using photo filter and curves adjustment layers with masks.
5. Multiple curves adjustment layers for contrast, saturation and luminosity
6. A levels layer to correct the slight blue cast
7. A channel mixer layer to add a little saturation (this gives better results than the hue/sat in my opinion)
8. Create edge sharpening layer

jjbong

Nice result.

Alex Nail wrote:

6. A levels layer to correct the slight blue cast

How does this work? I've not heard of this one.

Alex Nail

The central eye dropper tool in the levels dialogue box is a white balance tool. It will convert any point you click on to a neutral colour and make the corresponding change tot he rest of the image. I have found that this tool as an adjustment layer, with the opacity tweaked, offers a very quick and often excellent white balance tool. It is certainly a lot faster than curves.

Alex

jjbong

Alex Nail wrote:

John, whilst I agree there is a slight blue cast int he above image, I prefer the shot before you edited it. I think you have taken the warming and saturation too far in the girls face, she looks like she has fake tan.

Quite possibly, especially since I never saw the girl in real life. I've found that when I do shots of people (which is not most of what I do), at a certain point I need the person for whom I'm doing it (the subject, usually, but not always) next to me to help me set the strength (read opacity) of various moves.

jjbong

Alex Nail wrote:

The central eye dropper tool in the levels dialogue box is a white balance tool. It will convert any point you click on to a neutral colour and make the corresponding change tot he rest of the image. I have found that this tool as an adjustment layer, with the opacity tweaked, offers a very quick and often excellent white balance tool. It is certainly a lot faster than curves.

Alex

Thanks. I do the equivalent in Camera Raw, often with the aid of a grey card. However, I often find more complex casts in shots, even those where artificial lighting isn't involved. Curves are usually sufficient, but very occasionally I have to use a mask of some sort to fix them (usually luminosity, hit with a curve), or a channel blend, etc.