Thought I'd post this here, as this is my second "home" and rarely do I venture to the other fourms on this site.
As many of you know, I rarely do the same exact thing to every picture. But here is something I do with almost all my pictures that many of you may be interested in. It concerns contrast and shadow detail. Let me know what you think. The image I used to illustrate my technique was chosen at random from my files...nothing special, just something that had a lot of white.
With digital, it behooves one to shoot for the highlights. But this forces you to compromise a bit at the shadows. In addition, many of us shoot with low contrast to make sure we get as much dynamic range as possible, opting to adjust the contrast/curves later in PS.
Here are the steps I take to quickly adjust contrast and bring out some shadow detail. I've included a before and after image to illustrate my points. Hope you find it useful. You can even make an action out of the steps I'm about to outline and automate the process.
A little dull due to a lack of contrast, and a little dark (because I didn't want to blow out the highlights of the bright flowers).
Here's what I do:
1. Duplicate the layer, which will create a "background copy" layer.
2. In your layers palette, click on the little eye icon to the left of the "background copy" layer to make that layer invisible.
3. Click on the "background" layer to make that layer active.
4. Perform an auto contrast on this "background" layer (you can use the keyboard shortcut combo of Ctrl-Alt-Shift-L). Don't worry if the highlights get blown.
5. Now click on the "background copy" layer to make it active (the little eye icon to the left of this layer should be seen again).
6. Under the select menu, choose color range.
7. In the color range window, choose "shadows" from the dropdown menu and click "ok".
8. Now, under the select menu again, choose "feather".
9. In the "feather" window, choose a relatively large value, between 50-120 or so. (For this image I chose 75).
10. Now invert your selection (keyboard combo is Ctrl-Shift-I)
11. Go under the layers menu and choose "add layer mask" and select "reveal selection".
You'll notice that I have more shadow detail and the contrast is improved, while maintaining my highlights. This image still needs a bit of tweaking, but much less than before, I think.
Try this process on a few of your images and let me know how they turn out. You may be pleasantly surprised. Good luck! :-)
We need much more of this type of sharing at this forum, I hope this will get moved to the articles section of the forum after its run here. Thanks for sharing this technique with us
Mahesh, thanks very much for this. Today i posted an image and immediately got the comment to increase the contrast. The comment was absolutely right but i wasn't quite sure how to go about this without blowing things out.
I'll turn this into an action and surely will use it very often. In fact, i might set up a whole new action folder that will be named MT Wisdom. Hint, hint
Helene P wrote:
Mahesh, thanks very much for this. Today i posted an image and immediately got the comment to increase the contrast. The comment was absolutely right but i wasn't quite sure how to go about this without blowing things out.
I'll turn this into an action and surely will use it very often. In fact, i might set up a whole new action folder that will be named MT Wisdom. Hint, hint
Helene, maybe instead of "MT wisdom", it should be labeled "empty wisdom" (assuming everything that goes in it will be from me)
thapamd wrote:
Helene, maybe instead of "MT wisdom", it should be labeled "empty wisdom" (assuming everything that goes in it will be from me)
lol
Oh, gosh, i didn't pronounce those initials when i was typing them. It's cute but totally inaccurate. Glad you didn't say that setting up a whole folder would be overdoing it - very promising.
Mahesh,
Thanks. I tried this on a hopelessly flat shot with the sky right on the edge of wash-out. The Autocontrast did very little, so I went back and wound the Contrast by hand (+30). The result is really good.
Mark Schapper wrote:
Mahesh,
Thanks. I tried this on a hopelessly flat shot with the sky right on the edge of wash-out. The Autocontrast did very little, so I went back and wound the Contrast by hand (+30). The result is really good.
Regards,
Mark
Glad it worked, Mark. Yes, instead of doing the auto contrast step, you can definitely do a manual adjutment and tailor it to your likeness. The good thing about this technique is it's simple for those who don't want to "mess around" too much, but also has enough adjustable steps so the more advanced user can customize it to his/her taste.
Hey Mahesh!, its nice to have cool tips like this from the experts. Thanks very much for sharing it. I tried it on a couple of shots and its very promising. Thanks!
This is a somewhat complicated procedure that ignores some photoshop fundamentals. I suggest learning a basic level adjustment and contrast adjustment in curves first (Not the auto commands) .
Look at the basic techniques at luminous landscape or buy one of the better books. Luminous landscape has a good tutorial on contrast masks. It doesn't take long to learn, and its much more useful than following someone elses procedure.
As a side note, if you wish to increase contrast without increasing saturation do it as a layer with blending mode set to luminosity.
These are basic photoshop techniques that are well worth learning if one has paid for full photoshop. The above image would look better with just a simple curves adjustment.
Oct 01, 2003 at 11:03 AM
John Smeets Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
