Suddie1215 - Week 1 Example 5

[mikemeister_admin]

Attached is a photo of an underexposed photo of an almost 200 yr old, one-room schoolhouse I came across while hiking in a nature preserve.  As I recall I was shooting with Circular Polarizer on my camera to reduce the possible reflections and the deepen the color of the sky.  Unfortunately my camera's meter did not compensate enough for the effect of the polarizer and I ended up with an underexposed shot.

[mikemeister_admin]

Here's the result after tweaking the image with Curvemeister.

[mikemeister_admin]

Here's how I did it:

First I opened the image in Curvemeister in LAB mode.  I then right-clicked on the Lightness tab (any of them will work) and switched the Options to view "Black on Left" since I'm more comfortable reading the curves that way.

I then right-clicked at the base of the trees on the left side of the photo and set a Shadow point; which I then raised to 10 to open up some of the deep shadows.
Then I right-clicked again and set a Highlight point in the brightest area of the clouds.  I then used the Pin Grid command to pin the upper left portion of the Ligtness Curve, and pushed the lower left portion of the curve up to further open up the shadow areas.  By dragging my cursor across the image and observing where the indicator fell on the curve I was able to identify exactly the areas I wanted to adjust; which I did by dragging off some of the previously pinned points, and adding other in the lower portion of the curve.

The Saturation slider was then used to boost colors until I was satisfied with the effect.  Manipulating the Lightness Curve introduced a bit of a blue cast which I eliminated by boosting the mid-point of the *b* channel; which warmed up the image a bit.

Attached is a screen cap of the curves I applied to the photo.  Are they too aggressive?  I'm working on an aging, uncalibrated CRT so its sometimes difficult to judge properly.

Question:  Is it possible to change the Saturation slider without first fixing Shadow and Highlight points?  I know I can't see the other modes without fixing points but I couldn't get the slider to work in LAB mode after using the threshold to identify the Shadow and Highlight areas.

[ggroess]

The Slider only effects the A and B channels and is only available in LAB.  It is not found in any other color space.

It does nothing in the Lightness Tab since Lightness is independent from Color in Lab.  If a color cast was introduced here is was in the image to begin with....and you found it..and removed it...

I don't think you were too aggressive at all..the color looks great...

Rather than Pinning the upper part of the curve you can use the threshold feature to move the entire lightness side of the curve to the max highlight value in the image if you have not read the article on thresholding you can get it here:

http://curvemeister.com/downloads/Class/c1s1/Thresholding.pdf

Greg

[-default]

This is a fascinating image in several ways.  First, it has a neutral object as its main subject, and plenty of foliage, which does particularly well in Lab mode.

Your version is a definite improvement.  In the next class, as Greg mentions, we'll start using neutral points, which make correcting an image like this one easier.  We will also learn to make certain parts of the curve steeper to bring out detail.  In my version of this image, there are two steep parts to the Lightness curve that bring out detail in the front and sides of the schoolhouse.

[-default]

A similar correction in RGB mode.  Again, this is jumping ahead to neutrals, which we will be using in week 2.  I was able to make both walls of the school house closer to neutral, and then use the "floating neutral" feature to adjust the contrast of the walls while retaining the neutral color.