Friday, November 29, 2013

Adventures in Post, III

This image isn't one of mine: Chris shot it with a pocket Lumix on her way to work earlier this week. I took the jpg and made a few adjustments.
First, out of the camera:

Then, after being imported into Lightroom as a jpg and having blacks, clarity, vibrance, saturation, and contrast adjusted. This took me about 15, 20 seconds I would guess.


And the final one is after being taken into Photoshop and having contrast adjusted further with curves and a luminance mask. This takes longer - I'd guess this took maybe 5 minutes to get right. I also applied some sharpening. Applying an S curve that is masked to only the brightest areas (or rather, is masked to areas in proportion to their brightness) flattens the brightness curve of the whole image out, and makes the colours deeper and richer. It also reduces the importance of the central bright area, giving a more dynamic feel.





Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Adventures in Post

This is another in the series where I attempt to emulate the painterly post-processing currently fashionable in such magazines as Vogue and Vanity Fair.

This has some toning done, then a colour profile applied from a Paulo Roversi image masked with a luminance mask. The idea was to apply the colour to the shadowed areas and leave the highlights more or less alone.

The contrast was adjusted as the last step.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

More Adventures in Post Processing

This isn't there yet, but it's a start. I need to work out the luminance values before altering the colour, I think.

This has a very different feel from the unaltered image. The highlights are warm with a fair amount of magenta, while the shadows are cool.