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.