I always love your tutorials Moose - and the mouse-over trick is so
useful for the before/after. This tutorial was even better 'cos it
was my pic that you fixed upf or me!
[But I'm having difficulty with the mouseovering - the image flickers
briefly as I move the mouse across the button borders but doesn't stay
:-( I wonder if it's my IE6 browser or something else - anyone else
got it working ok?]
I'm going to take my time and experiment with your suggestions - both
PS-wise and compositionally - they're greatly appreciated.
with many thanks
jez
ps - I didn't see where the frog trail came from but you could well be
right in thinking it's poop. The picture is more nicer without it.
And it could be more frogs or fishes under the pad - the pond was
teeming.
On 8/18/06, Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I suggest that the two RAW conversion approach is overkill for this
> image. Looking at image, this is not a very high brightness range
> subject, particularly considering the light illuminating it.
>
> Looking at the histogram, there is only a very small bit of clipped
> highlight. Just a slight adjustment of the white point (often labeled
> 'exposure') in conversion should correct that. Even without that, and
> working from an 8-bit jpeg, it's not difficult to bring more tonal
> detail to the lily while making it less of a hot spot and bring up the
> interest level of the frog and pads.
>
> Here's a little experiment in broadening my very limited HTML skills to
> show a simple work flow for processing this image. I couldn't figure out
> how to make the boxes different colors, oh well
> <http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/JezC/lilypad.htm>.
>
> 1 - Original image. Note the tiny bump at the very top of the histogram.
> There is a bit of lost detail, but not much. The sharp 'hill' a little
> lower down is most of the lily. Convert to 16 bit before going any further.
>
> 2 - I've applied only the highlight part of Highlight/Shadow quite
> strongly. Notice how it flattens and spreads out the hill and compresses
> the lower part of the histogram. How PS decides to allocate the few
> values that appear to be maxed out in the histogram, I don't know, but
> it manages.
>
> This makes the image very flat/washed out. That's intentional as
> preparation for later steps. I think Amount was 50-60, Tonal Width 50
> and Radius quite low. Radius is very sensitive for the lily in this
> particular image. Small changes make a big differences in the shading of
> the petals. Someone else might easily make a slightly different choice.
>
> At this point, I also used Select=>Color=>Highlights & Layer=>New=>Layer
> via Copy to create a new layer with the low highlights from the very low
> key lily, leave it at the top of the layers and turned off. I know from
> experience that I may need it later. If you work with lots of layers,
> this can be done later from the S/H layer, if needed.
>
> 3 - Here, I've applied both some LCE and Curves adjustments. Notice how
> the central part of the histogram is back to looking more like in the
> original. I've intentionally let the bottom clip, as I want those dark
> areas that have no detail of interest to go black for dramatic effect.
> The hill at the top has also reappeared in mure spread out form, giving
> nice tonal graduations in the lily petals. The rest of the image now has
> much more inner contrast detail, giving it the visual interest to
> balance the lily.
>
> 4 - Finally, I thought the lily was still just a little too intense in
> the overall composition. I turned on the level with just the highlights
> from step two and adjusted it's opacity to get the effect I wanted. It
> ended up at between 25 and 30%. You can see in the histogram how the
> "lily hill" moves just slighly to the left, but still leaves some values
> all the way to the end.
>
> I'm sure my result is not quite what anyone else would choose, but I
> like it much better than the original. And more to the point, the lily
> has been tamed and the elements of the image brought into better tonal
> balance without any need to do any fancy multiple conversion blending.
>
> I do occasionally blend images with different exposures when using a P&S
> with only JPEG capability. I really don't think it is necessary with RAW
> images, no matter what those selling you their technique or software
> say. The camera only records 12-14 bits from the sensor. So proper RAW
> conversion should allow outputting all of that data in a 16 bit TIFF
> without any loss of tonal data at all.
>
> From there on, it's just a matter of redistributing the tonal values as
> necessary to fit your own vision of the image. It may, in fact, be
> quicker and/or easier to do two RAW conversions and feed them into an
> automated merge function/program/plug-in, particularly for someone with
> limited editing skills*. I don't know, because I haven't tried any such
> tools. My bet is that they will still need work to get everything in place.
>
> Finally, is that stuff behind the frog what I think it is? Anyway, I
> took it out of the final image. And what is that thing peeking out under
> the lily pad, frog? fish?
>
> Moose
>
> *Well, more limited than mine. There is still a lot I don't know.
>
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