JoAnn's Statue of Liberty

[joann]

Here's my Statue of Liberty Exercise 6. Question. I wasn't happy with the way this looked and took it back to Curvemeister, loaded the ACV file. The photo turned very bright and washed out. Not like I saved it. How do you get it back to work on the photo without starting all over?

I'll go back and work on Dandelions.
JoAnn H

[ggroess]

OK...If you work on an image in CM and click apply....The curves are applied and the image is updated...If you take that image and re-open in CM and apply the ACV file you have re-applied the curves you just applied. You would double the adjustment.

If you want to get back to the beginning and you have clicked apply.  You can use the undo feature of PS to undo the last filter   or go to PS history and undo the CM filter step.  If you save the ACV file and then just exit without applying the curves you can re-open the image and apply the ACV.  Then take over from there...

My work flow for these images is to use "Save As" in PS after I have applied a curve so I do not lose the original.  It looks from your images that applied the Curves twice...

Greg

[joann]

OK, tried again.
I watch the video about thresholding and when you got the highlight point you moved it around to break up or get rid of other bright spots. Why did you do that and is this something we should be doing? I read somewhere that you do the same thing with the shadow point.
Question is the same. Why do we do that? What does it accomplish?

Here's my statue again. This time I set a neutral point on the background. Was this the correct thing to do?

I'm with Julie, I don't know what color green the statue should be. Nor the background. Don't think it is sky????
JoAnn H

[ggroess]

It is a sky just not a very blue sky.  
The Copper patina of the statue is subjective...you can look at other copper statues if you like to get a better idea of the color.  
It's a blue green but mostly green.  The Gold in the flame might also help you a bit...it should be gold and not green...your image looks pretty close actually...

As for the question about "thresholding" the S/H points....

Think of it this way.  Every bright spot in the mask for the highlight side is a point / area of the image that is brighter than the spot you have under the point you are dragging around.  Same for the shadow.  Every point darker than the mask is a area that is darker than your chosen shadow.  

The question then becomes do I as the artist,  want this point to be the darkest...or lightest...and...is this a significant shadow or highlight...significant is the key to the decision....if you want all of the image to be lighter than your chosen shadow point then try to eliminate all the dark spots that you can.  If you want to get to the brightest highlight then eliminate all the light spots you can.   You can do the same thing with the edge threshold but it is a bit more rough.  Most people settle for adjusting the threshold so that all of the S/H points are in the range.  So instead of leaving a few points out there they get rid of everything.

I look at the image first and decide if the shadow areas are important.  If they need detail.  If they do then I try to eliminate all of the dark areas on the mask.  If they are featureless areas that I don't care about I give them more weight by allowing them to be darker than my chosen shadow.  It's about knowing what you want in the image...the right and wrong of it is yours to decide.

Greg