Exercise 17: Colours into tones 2

The aim of this exercise is to make practical use of channel adjustment to achieve a specific effect.  Choose one of the following targets:

·         A landscape in which you emphasise the depth (aerial perspective) by strengthening the visual effect of haze.

·         A portrait in which lightens the complexion without significantly altering the tones of the rest of the image.

·         A picture of a garden in which the green vegetation appears light in tone.

 
In addition to this, for comparison, also prepare the default black and white conversion offered by your software, for example, desaturate.  Print the results in pairs (default conversion and your conversion.
  
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Original Image

My original image was a portrait of a young Ethiopian girl who wanted some pictures for her book as she wanted to break into modelling. 

I wanted to compare the images side by side so I had to combine them in one file in Photoshop to get them to stay next to each other, see below:

I wanted to change Fartuun's skin tone to make it lighter so had to first select it by usine the magnetic selection tool and refining it in Quick Mask Mode.

Once I'd selected her face I used the sliders to adjust it to a much lighter colour

Darkened Complexion

Once I had successfully changed just the facial colour I wanted to change the original image to make Fartuun’s complexion darker, just to see what happened and here’s the results:

I've enjoyed this exercise as it made me think about some new areas that I haven't really used before.  One thing though, I've found that the key to changing pictures successful and without being obvious is very careful selection of the area to adjust.  Once I had mastered the Quick Mask it became much easier.

Exercise 16: Colours into tones 1

Take or choose an image which contains at least two strong contrasting colours.  Using the channel sliders or controls available in your software create two opposite versions of the image in black and white.  In one lighten the greyscale tone of one of the colours and darken the tone of the contrasting colour as much as possible.  In the second version perform the reverse. 

          To begin with, make and save a ‘default’ black and white version and keep this as a reference.    You should aim to produce two black and white versions with a strong difference in their tonal distribution.  Write down what effect these different adjustment have on the creative quality of the image.

 Original Image

 
My original image was a picture of a tractor with strong orange and blue colourings

I desaturated the image (Ctrl+Shift+U) and below is my default black and white picture.

First Adjusted Image

I adjusted the red slider to increase the Reds/Oranges and got the result below:

Second Adjusted Image

I went back to the original black and white image and adjusted the blue range and achieved the image below:

You can see from the images above that by increasing the red slider on the black and white option within Photoshop, it lightens the red within the image, making it a pale grey. This obviously has the reverse effect when decreasing the red slider; it then darkens that particular colour within the image.

Now that I’ve completed this exercise I’ve got a better grasp on how, by increasing tones it can influence other areas of colour.

Exercise 15: Black and white

Exercise 15 Black and White

Choose a subject. Lighting condition or picture situation that you think may look better in black-and-white than in regular colour.  In shooting you should try to ignore the colour element. 

Compose and expose for the black and white version that you will later process.  Process the image for black and white, and write down what effect shooting in black and white had on your choices of subject, framing, details of composition and exposure.  Note the results in your learning log.

Original Image

My original image was a colour portrait of a fellow student. I had to do some post processing as there was a fairly obvious red area on his forehead which I removed with the help of the Clone tool.

I took the image with one soft box to the front left with a black background. There is just a small catch light in his right eye but the light had been positioned to throw the left side of his face in almost total darkness.

I applied the Sharpening filter and then used the Desaturate control to change it to black and white.

I felt that this image was far stronger than the coloured images as the discrepancies in Jan’s skin tones no longer distracted the eye from the main overall image.  The tee shirt also seems more defined than as a coloured item.  Generally the image is much better in black and white than colour.

Exercise 14: Interpretative processing

Choose an image that you feel is open to different creative interpretation(s) – an image with a lower dynamic range than usual will give more opportunities for varied processing.

To complete this exercise, make three different versions of the same image, together with a written explanation of what you were trying to achieve, and an assessment of how well you think you have succeeded.

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Original Image

Original Image

It’s quite a low dynamic image which I felt had lots of potential. I used a similar picture in assignment 2 but felt I needed a different one to work on.

First thing I always do is check the Histogram Levels to see how the main areas pan out.  Here there is lots of low contrast and a block of dark tones, see below:

I adjusted the black and the white tones to give the picture a bit more depth, i.e., black from 0 to 14, mid-tones from 1.00 to 0.54 and white from 255 to 231:

I decided to investigate using the Image/Adjust/Brightness & Contrast and changed the settings to Brightness -100 and Contrast to 80. I had to take care how much I changed as, when I increased the Brightness the sky became banded and pixelated. 

I thought I would see if there would be much difference if I used the Shadows/Highlights to bring out the boat’s dark hull so opened the Shadows & Highlights palette and brought back the Shadows from its initial 50% to 10% and left the Highlights at 0% as this increased the pixilation:

I liked the dark and moody look that I had achieved so felt this would be a good point to leave well alone. 

Here’s my first completed image below:

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Second Image

  
Rather than revert back to the original image I thought I would use the image I had just created as the start point for my second picture.

As per usual, I looked at the Levels histogram first to see what had occurred after I had manipulated the original image and could see that there was a more even spread of all the tonal areas.

I decided to desaturate the picture to turn it to black and white so went to Images/Adjustments/desaturate and it changed to a grey scale picture.  I had to be careful that that the Mode hadn’t changed from RGB to Greyscale as this would have meant that I couldn’t introduce any colours later on if I wanted to.

I’ve been exploring infra-red pictures lately and wanted to see if it was possible to change a simple greyscale image into an infra-red one through the options available.  I worked my way through the menus and palettes under Image/Adjustments and thought that Selective colour might give some interesting changes.  I opened it and saw that I was able to change the various colour areas but decided to concentrate on the blacks so moved the slider the whole way across from 0 to -100 and this, in one movement, gave me the image I was looking for.

Here’s the final image for Picture 2, very spooky especially with the bird flying through it:

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Third Image

For my third picture I went back to the original image to create a sepia toned image which could have been taken in the last century. I went back to my original image:

 

I had to desaturate the picture as I had described in the previous section using Image/Adjustment/Desaturate:

Once I had desaturated the image I checked to make sure it was still in the RGB Mode so that I could colorize it to a sepia tone. This was okay so I went to the Adjustments palette to add sepia colours.  I had to tick the Colorize box and changed the Hue from 0 to 20, the Saturation box from 0 to 25 and left the Lightness at 0.  This gave the image below:

I used the Filter Gallery to add various effects but felt all the different styles were superfluous to the original image.  The only effect that I did like was the neon glow but it was a bit too uncanny for me.

So the final image for me was the straight sepia toned picture:

Exercise 12: Managing Tone

Excercise:

Choose one image which is available in JPEG and RAW which needs some adjustments. Then use your processing software to adjust both images to a satisfactory state.

JPEG

·         Set the black point and white point
·         Assess and adjust the brightness of mid tones
·         Assess and if necessary adjust the contrast
·         If necessary make corrections to localised areas.

RAW
·         Set the black and white points using Exposure
·         Assess and if necessary adjust the brightness of the midtones
·         Assess and if necessary adjust the contrast
·         If necessary make corrections in localised areas

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JPEG

Original JPEG Image

Original Image

Here’s my original image above taken in January 2012.  The whole image is very low key apart from the two boats in the middle section.

JPEG Procedures

Firstly, I opened Levels and you can see the original settings below.

I set the sliders to be nearly touching the main parts of the histogram

This changed the image to look like the one below:

Black and white sliders adjusted

Now I changed the midtones using the Levels again; you have to be careful not to overdo it as the image can look unnatural.

Mid tones adjusted

See how the new picture has more definition in the colours and the bluish haze has been removed. 

Mid tones adjusted

Compare the two images

The original image is pale and has a bluish haze; the final adjusted image has a much more interesting colour and definition.

Original image

Levels adjusted image

RAW

Original RAW Image

The original image in RAW which you can see below through the RAW Plugin converter in Photoshop CS5:

If I change the setting from default to Auto Adjust you can see quite a dramatic change to the image:

The settings have changed as follows:

·         Exposure from 0 to -0.10
·         Recovery from 0 to +1
·         Blacks from 5 to 70
·         Brightness from +50 to 0
·         Contrast from +25 to +50

If I change the settings manually one at a time you see the following changes:

·         Adjust the black point and the white point by adjusting Exposure:

The red warning areas have come on to indicate that there was very little detail on the side of the white rowing boat and the yellow buoys. I moved the scale to +70 on the Recovery slider and this retrieved enough information to eliminate the red, blown areas, see above.

·         Assess and if necessary adjust the brightness of the mid-tones:

I adjusted the Exposure to correct the mid-tones and found that by taking the reading up to -1.00 it made the whole image darker but this was corrected in Contrast when I changed the reading to +86.

·         Assess and if necessary adjust the contrast.  Experiment with both Contrast:

·         Assess and if necessary adjust the contrast.  Experiment with Tone Curve:

I changed the Highlights, using Tone Curve, to -43 but had to decide how much to reduce as, when I took it too far to the left, some of the figures took on a blue hue when they should have been black.  I made the Lights +46 as this lifted the image and although it looks dark in the screen shot above, it is considerably lighter when saved as a TIFF or JPEG file.

I changed the Darks to -12 and I altered the Shadows only slightly to -15 as too much darkened the picture too much.

I saved it as a TIFF file in case I wanted to make any further corrections using Levels or Shadows/Highlights, but this is the final image from the RAW file.

To compare the two sets of images, here is the final RAW image on the left and the final JPEG image on the right.

JPEG final image

RAW converted final image

Whilst the RAW image is still slightly darker than I would like I managed to retrieve much more detail using the RAW converter software than by using Levels and Shadows/Highlights for the JPEG image.  i can adjust the darker image using Levels.

Exercise 13: Managing Colour

Find two or three images that have a significant colour cast as the main purpose of the exercise is to ‘correct’ it.  Make sure that at least one image contains a surface that is ‘known’ (that is, expected) to be grey.  Among such grey surfaces are concrete, steel, aluminium, car tyres, asphalt, thick clouds and shadows on white.   First examine the image and make a judgement on the colour cast.  Then use your processing software to adjust both images to a satisfactory state.


JPEG

Here’s my original image with one with a purple cast from using Fluorescent white balance.



Image with Auto in camera white balance

Image with Fluorescent white balance

JPEG Procedures

This café image has a very distinctive purple colour cast so I needed to remove it by firstly using the grey point in Levels, see below:

Even with this the picture still has a distinctive purple cast so I opened up the Colour Balance palette and adjusted the three sliders to eliminate it as much as possible.  The new readings were:

Cyan/Red -6, Magenta/Green +4, Yellow/Blue +15

I think it would be virtually impossible to remove the colour cast from the notices in the window but I used the Magnetic Selection tool to selection just the notices and used the Colour Balance palette to make additional changes.

The additional changes I made were:

Cyan/Red -30, Magenta/Green +47, Yellow/Blue -30

These do seem to have restored the notices to a more natural colour as you can see from the Closed notice which should have been white but still retains the purple cast.

Here’s the before and after pictures to compare:

Before

After

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RAW

This is the image again with the Auto white balance as a point of reference

Original image

The original image in RAW which you can see below through the RAW Plugin converter:

You can see that there is a large amount of red in the picture, indicating that there is very little detail in those areas.  See screenshot below to see background details in the image:

I used the sliders to alter the image and remove the purple cast in the following amounts:

Recovery 25, Blacks 2, Brightness +47, Contrast +19

And the image changed to a more balanced colour way:

Final RAW converted image:

Using the RAW settings enabled me to get a more realistic image than from the JPEG image and having to work on it after I had opened it.  The RAW image stored information which could be changed more easily and successfully.