Gus Week 1 Exercise 1

[mikemeister_admin]

I used CM in lab mode to avoid any color shifts.  Adjusted image with light and dark thresholds (these are really great!).  Made final color adjustments using saturation slider to make colors more vivid.  Used unsharp mask to sharpen image.

A question --  I noticed that CM only works on the background layer. Is there a way to have it work on a copy of the backgound image?

Appreciate any feedback.

Gus

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Hi Gus,

Not bad - you're certainly advancing past the immediate challenge pf this exercise which is to simply set the shadow point.  Increasing the saturation in Lab mode is a good move for this image, and avoids the rather candy-like colors of correcting in RGB, particularly in the sky.  Be careful, though.  The building is indeed white, and when increasing saturation, strange color differences are possible.  In this case the left side of the front of the building is red, and the right side is blue.  Although it's generally a better compromise to go warm than cold in an image, I would still avoid this degree of red in the left part of the building, and allow the shadow to go bluer.

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Re the second part of your post - Curvemeister operates only on the currently active layer.  In Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements, you can quickly duplicate the background layer by dragging it on to the "new" icon along the bottom edge of the Layer palette, and I often do this.