Curvemeister Forum

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your suggestions about the week 5 exercises I posted - I will get back to you about those in an hour or two...

I was quite surprised to read the implementation of the Man from Mars technique in this week's course notes - I had always understood it to be a method of mimicking simultaneous contrast in monochromatic images. It seems appropriate to use it for the Taroko Gorge, Taiwan image, but for this image there seems too much colour variation initially for it to be safe.

I decided that - useful as 'Man from Mars' would be on the fountain, it would likely ruin the background (even the more conservative example in the classnotes is too strong for my taste) unless I used the 'Blend If' sliders (in Lab) to protect the background. So, I moved the file into Lab before I opened CurveMeister, and started to play. I am sure that I will have another go at this, so consider this a first-attempt rather than my final correction.

I used a Man from Mars move, and some RGB contrast pinning - and I used wgCMYK to lighten the shadows slightly. I won't attach the curves I used, as the results are dependant upon my Blend If settings - but I'm interested to know your thoughts :).

Cheers,
Lee.

I think on a first blush that it needs more color contrast in the greens. 

Mike chose this image for MFM mainly because It can survive being smacked around quite a bit.  I always ask people to push this image a bit over the top because most are generally timid about color for fear that they are going to introduce a color cast.

When you come from an RGB background and have always had trouble with color you can see where this is a game changer.  setting a reasonable pivot point and pushing this image around is actually a fun way to break down those barriers.

Try adjusting the slider first and then adding about 5-10 % more curve to the B channel and see if the color survives better.

Greg