Week 2 Link.

This forum is for the 201 Class preview testers and discussion.
ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Mon Feb 10, 2014 6:00 pm

Let me think on that one...
Some of the sources are obscure by today's standards. 

There might be some linkage in the Pinterest site...

http://www.pinterest.com/curvemeister/

Greg

imported_julie
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Postby imported_julie » Wed Feb 12, 2014 12:51 am

Hi

I have been watching the videos.
They are really useful.
I particularly found the one on channels interesting and informative
I have been using channels for a while now to improve contrast without really knowing what I was doing
I found watching this really explained to me what I was looking for - I often felt I just guessing
You really explained what to look for in the channels and what might be problem areas very clearly

The highlight and shadow videos where also great.
Would you mind also explaining what is the difference between highlights/shadows and whites/blacks in acr
if I have missed this I apologise

I had a thought for week 1
Given that anyone doing this class will be a curvemeister fan, and willing to devote time to processing images, here is a suggestion
How about a preparation week where you are not available (so your time is not compromised) but class members do some of the exercises and readings before commencing the class itself
The printing exercise is likely to take me a while, so for me it would be useful to have that done early.
Maybe the members could communicate among themselves?
Its just a suggestion

Week 2 is really good and I will keep exploring it
Julie

 

ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:50 pm

Julie,
In ACR the Highlight adjustment is different from the Whites adjustment in that more of the curve is affected by the adjustment.  The whites adjustment behaves like a curve that is pinned at the 3/4 tones and up.  From what would be 75 on the L channel to 100 appears to be moved by the Whites slider in ACR.

Same for the shadows...just the 1/4 tones and lower are effected by Black while the shadow setting affects the entire curve.

As for week 1...

I am looking at making it "sessions" rather than weeks.  Weeks imply's a deadline for finishing.  I'm thinking that the class has to be from 4 to 6 weeks in length variable based on accomplishment and desire to move on.  Otherwise I have to find a break point for week 1 and cut it in half.  I t would not be fatal but I'm certainly listening and wondering how that would play out.

If you find any grammar or typos let me know as well.
Greg

imported_artmar
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Postby imported_artmar » Fri Feb 14, 2014 1:34 am

Hi Greg,

Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. 

I've read session 2 a few times, and worked through some of the exercises. I think it's excellent, and really have no suggestions for how to revise it.
A small point: I found the first exercise -- find the 10 changes -- rather difficult this time, and I'm still not positive I've found all ten (depends on how you count a group of reflections).
I'm not sure about the best way to set up this exercise in Photoshop, and that might be something for us to talk about.
I think your time scale for the entire 201 course may be unrealistic if you're thinking 4 - 6 weeks. There's so much key foundational material here, one could easily spend months on it. I understand that this is an introduction so that we can continue working on our own, but I think that 4-6 weeks assumes that people will spend several hours a day on the material, which may not be realistic.  I could be wrong about this, so I'm interested to  hear what Julie and Martin think.

I thought the "channels video" was clear and very informative. You talk of either adjusting or throwing out a channel. Do you ever find DanM's strategy (at least that's where I first saw it) of blending some percentage of one channel into another useful? I've been experimenting with this and find the results, at my current level of non-expertise, totality unpredictable, and I'm wondering if the benefits, in your opinion, are worth the effort of learning more about how to do this (?)

Nothing more to say at this point, but to thank you so much for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us.

Cheers,
Art


ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Fri Feb 14, 2014 2:17 pm

I'll post the solution to the week two find it puzzle so you can sleep..lol.  I understand the difficulty...I tried to make it harder than last time.

re: length of the class...It is all up in the air; overall I use "weeks" as a break point because that is the way we have done it in the the past.  There have been many different ways of looking at the class. Lee Harper has suggested a subscription model where you buy the class or each segment and work through it at your pace and I/We support the entire class without regards to a boundary in time.  So if you have a week 1 question today and a week 4 question tomorrow it matters not to me. 

I would hold a weekly "court" call, where we took all questions big and small and worked through them so long as people were there to participate.  This would make the class continuous and anyone could take it anytime.

I'd like to hear more thoughts on that...

re: DM's channel blending.  You know I can see it both ways.  In general, I find that if I am going after a specific problem, I am not throwing the baby out with the bath water to replace a bad channel.  Week three is all about Black and White conversion and we are going to cover masking the separate channels by using the "split" image command. This is a technique I learned by reading Katrin Eismann and it can be very effective in building a great black and white image.  Part of the reason you are getting inconsistent results with channel blending is the difficulty in "pre-seeing" the mix.  It is one of the great shortfalls of Photoshop in that it does not often give you a full screen view of what you are going to do when you apply a filter or make a blend like that.  I'll take a second look at the channel blending process Dan is advocating and see if there is a different or better way.  Remember DM is sort of bound to Photoshop and we can bend the rules so to speak in CM.

Greg


ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Fri Feb 14, 2014 5:48 pm

Art,
Having reviewed the channel blending Dan is showing  in his video...

The one thing he does not talk to you about is having a good Blue channel to work with to begin with.  In the grapevine example her is working with there is a decent Blue channel to work with and he probably could curve the blue channel enough to make it work without doing the blends.

That is probably why you are getting inconsistent results. A bad blue channel will blend bad data into the other channels.  If you have blocked up data in the channel; blending the blocked data into a good channel without blocked data will in effect block that other channel with what ever percent of the blocked data from the blue channel. I hope I make sense there...If not ask...It might require a video. 

Do I always throw away a blue channel?  NOPE...I just do that when it contains data I do not want to fight...
Greg

imported_artmar
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Postby imported_artmar » Fri Feb 14, 2014 7:08 pm

Greg,

I'm corrupting a good channel by blending in some portion a bad channel.  Makes perfect sense -- once you point it out!

On the subject of replacing channels. Something I've noticed is that if I replace a noisy blue channel, with, say, a good green channel, and then chose luminosity blend mode, the "new" blue channel for the resultant image looks not very dissimilar to old blue channel (still pretty noisy for example).  I'm assuming that Photoshop has to retain many of the properties of the previous blue channel, even though it was "replaced", in order to get the color right?

Thanks again,

Art

ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Sun Feb 16, 2014 3:22 pm

I will look into the noise issue a bit more.

A noise filled image has noise in all channels it is not just as strong in each other channel and because of the properties of the blue channel we see it easily. Smooth blue skies make it easy to see off color pixels.

Greg

imported_ganna
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Postby imported_ganna » Thu Feb 27, 2014 3:39 pm

I'll be off to Kruger Gamereserve for a week and hopefull will have time to practice "seeing" :D

ggroess
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Postby ggroess » Thu Mar 06, 2014 2:16 pm

Please do...Explore the newness...
Greg


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