Curvemeister Forum

let's try to brighten this up a bit...
It could use a bit of sharpening as well

Greg

Hi Greg.A straight foreward solution is to pull in the ends of the lightness channel a bit, then add some saturation.On a second pass I took magenta  in the a channel down a bit,it had gone a bit neon.Sharpening was amount 100,radius 1.1.I've got a new 22in monitor and it really helps see what going on in an image.GregM

Greetings Greg...

Nicely done for openers...now....

Drama....can you make the image more dramatic and draw the viewer into the leaf more....

Greg

Well, it's a drab Sunday morning in England, so I thought I'd spend a bit of time on this one. It took several passes.

First was a standard highlight/shadow fix. There's no neutral, and HSB looked best to my eye.

Next was an LAB colour break up, as per Chapter 12 of the LAB Color book. I wanted to push up the colours in the foremost leaf while easing down the colours in the blurred out background leaves.

Then I did another pass in LAB to add some contrast to the L curve.

At that point I thought that the magenta was starting to over ride the yellows too much, so I tried turning it down. That made the image a bit flat, so I boosted the yellow instead. That looked better.

One more pass the brighten the whole thing, and I was happy with the colours.

I then did an edge sharpen to bring out the leaf edge definitions without making the faces of the leaves go grainy (as a standard USM did), then put a vignette around it.

Very nice... Does the Blue in the upper right bother you at all??
Just curious mostly to get at the decision process...

Greg

Redo.Hadn't used adjust sharpness much before,didn't have a context.

For the new class members...

Begin with the Curvemeister wizard and see how far you can get the image...
We'll begin by looking a the image and describing the general process used to adjust the image.

1) Overall the image is flat. There are few pure whites and few pure blacks.  There seems to be a neutral density filter over the image.
2) Depth of field is short and indistinct.
3) Colors are muted; currently this is related to the overall flatness, but once we begin we need to keep the color saturation in mind.
4) Sharpening needs to occur at some level.

These are my goals.  sometimes i write them down, sometimes I just say them out loud.  I need to keep them in mind as I process the image so that i do not get distracted or forget one of the goal along the way.

I am going to work on fixing each of these problems in the image.  Using Curvemeister I can attack all of them, even to some extent the sharpness.  The first problem for me is what color space do I use.....

I'd like some suggestions and any questions you have...Feel free to post away...

Greg

Very nice... Does the Blue in the upper right bother you at all??
Just curious mostly to get at the decision process...

Actually I hadn't even noticed it. :) It probably doesn't belong there, but there are enough colours in that image that it doesn't really register to my eye.

I quickly went back into CM and found it's easy to remove that blue with either a lizard tail on the B of RGB, or locking the LAB B channels' yellow side then flattening off the blue side. But I spent enough time on that image yesterday!

Greetings

Since the response has been overwhelming and silent.....
I shall make some choices for myself and proceed to correct this image in Curvemeister.

I'm going to choose LAB as a color space for this image since it has the advantages of being able to correct the contrast and brightness of the image without changing the colors in the image.  I am also choosing the LAB space to introduce it to the new students and show what LAB can do quickly.

First I will adjust the Shadow Highlight and Neutral of the image.  (SHN) This step is 1st because until it is done it is very difficult to assess the overall image and see what is really in need of correction.  Many times the SHN correction will fix most of the issues you are having with your images.

Shot 1 is the image after a "reasonable"  SHN adjustment using the thresholding feature of Curvemeister (CM).

Here is a good article about Thresholding with CM
http://www.curvemeister.com/wiki/index.php?title=Highlight_and_Shadow_Thresholding

More to Come....

Greg

From the Shot 1 image you can adjust the saturation of the colors in LAB using the saturation slider.  It is found in the Curvemeister wizard or in the lower right panel of the CM window.

Shot2 is the color pushed way too far using the Saturation Slider.

Shot 3 is where I will settle on the saturation for now.

Next we will sharpen a bit...

Greg