Black & Blue

[chrisc]

I did the same thing a few days ago, but at the risk of sounding brutish as per the white and black point sets, I decided to not post the results for a few days.

One more thing you can do with these images is work the blues a bit more back toward "real" color, is work within the HSB adjustment by changing the "Master" to "Blue", using the 1st eyedropper and selecting 4-6 blues in the scene, then adjusting the saturation and brightness sliders: sat left, bright right, though they really can go in whatever direction will make them work best. I often do two or three HSB layers, working each color that seems overcooked.

janis asked me to tell her what bothered me when I figured it out, and it is the over-blue which, while having a certain impact, is in that color overcook range for my eyes. Each of the posted images works much better with the set point adjustment and the color adjustment without losing anything to the composition or overall visual acuity she has given them.

[janis]

Thanks, Steve, Nick and Chris. Nick, I can easily do what you have suggested. Don't know why it didn't occur to me, given how much setting the points has dominated recent threads. Chris, I don't know if I can translate your suggestions into Aperture, but I will try to figure it. Thank you all; this is extremely helpful and will save me time working on some of the others from that night that I think have potential.

[janis]

The latest version of Aperture has an auto white balance feature for skin tones and neutral grey that has been favourably reviewed, and given my troubles with white balancing, I thought I should give it a try. However, the lengthy update required an even lengthier upgrade of my OS to Mountain Lion, which itself required a major clean-up of my system. At the same time, my hard drive was full to bursting, so I also purchased and installed a 2TB external drive and moved a bunch of RAW files on to it so that I could resuming editing without risking a major system crash. This, along with a bit of reading about white balance and curves, has been the better part of a week's work, but so far, everything has gone smoothly. (Knock on wood.)

I'm thinking this auto white balance feature at least provides a good starting point. This is one of the above images, with Kit's crop, Auto White Balance and Definition applied, the white point set on each of the RGB curves, and a slight RGB curve applied. Let me know what you think.

[Stevewebb]

Thats quite an improvement Janis.

[janis]

Thanks, Steve.

[The Wirefox]

Nobody calls me 'sweet' Wirefox. I can do sweet. I like little kittens, puppy dogs with wet noses and I have a cuddly monkey that lives in my bed (don't tell Seri I said that for god sakes)...actually he is very sweet and has a little blue t-shirt that says "I Love You Daddy". See how sweet is that?

Jan, No 2 is a beautiful. The only thing I would say is that the speckles of light in the reflection could be reduced by introducing blue into them..or be omitted altogether. I would be interested to see the Jiro processing technique used on this one too.

[The Wirefox]

Cross posting...absolutely love your latest edit but those highlights definitely need to go now. Have you used any denoiseing at all? Certainly is a wall hanger.

[nickjohnson]

Oh Janis, I feel your pain. All one wants to do is run a software upgrade and boom, your into hardware, OS, software that used to work and suddenly stops working, and so on.
Judging by your post I have to say that I think the trouble was very definitely worth it.
I think now you can take that set of images forward and make them look how you want – rather than having to accept things as they where.

[janis]

Sept 1, 2012 21:02:59 GMT The Wirefox said:

I can do sweet.

Hah! I bet it goes down like cod liver oil.

Fact is, the first edits are too sweet even for me.

I would be interested to see the Jiro processing technique used on this one too.

Jiro, are you there?

Steve, can you do that technique using GIMP? Because I can't do it with Aperture. Aperture doesn't do layers, but I just read this week about a plug-in that allows you to.

Absolutely love your latest edit but those highlights definitely need to go now.

Your wish is my command, Old Drafty Pants.

Have you used any denoiseing at all?

I haven't. Do you think I need to? I can't judge very well on the laptop. On top of everything else, my 27" Apple Cinema Display has been acting up for the last month or so; it keeps going black on me. Luckily, I bought AppleCare for it and have an appointment to take it and my laptop in for troubleshooting next week.

Certainly is a wall hanger.

Thank you very much.

[janis]

Sept 1, 2012 21:11:29 GMT nickjohnson said:

Oh Janis, I feel your pain.

Thanks, Nick; its good to know somebody does.

Judging by your post I have to say that I think the trouble was very definitely worth it.

Thanks again! You helped to set me on the right track.

[The Wirefox]

Jan I will answer you questions about GIMP a little later..I have a date first

[The Wirefox]

Jan

I tried the Jiro effect or something like it in GIMP. It is not what this image needs after all but I did have a play with denoising. It is difficult working with a small jpeg file but this was the result;

I am getting a little bit of posterisation in the sky due to the base image quality. It would have worked better with the original image



I used GIMP commands Filters / Enhance /GREYCstoration to remove noise - settings as shown below



I then used a cheat...A tone mapping plug in You can download it here...ignore the comments it works in both GIMP 2.6 ans 2.8

registry.gimp.org/node/4562

Once the script is installed use commands Script-Fu / Enhance / Tone mapping. I used the default settings



To flatten the 'tone mapped' image use commands Image / Flatten image. Then use commands Colours / Curves to adjust the tonal curve. Drag either end of the curve to taste. I used the curve below



I then selected a soft 'sharpening' brush at 40% strength to brush over the rocks and the beach. With a small jpeg Unsharp Mask will introduce artifacts into the clouds and sky.

If yo do want to use a process similar to the Jiro technique us the following instructions;

Use GREYCstoration as above on the base image

Commands; Layer / Duplicate Layer

With the top layer selected desaturate the top layers using commands; Colours / Hue and saturation. drag the saturation layer all the way to the left.

Again with the top (desaturated) layer selected use commands; Colours / Brightness and Contrast to increase contrast of the desaturated layer - not too much

Next use commands Colours / Invert to invert the top layer

With the top layer selected, change the layer mode to 'Soft Light' then play around with the opacity slider to get the vibrancy required. For most images you will need to be down below 25% opacity

When you are happy with the effect flatten the image.

In GIMP 2.6 and below you can simply 'Save As'

With GIMP 2.8 you must 'export' the image to .jpg, .tiff or whatever your converted file needs to be

[janis]

Thank you for that, Steve. I don't have GIMP yet, but I expect I will before the year is out. I will file these instructions for that time.

After I posted, I remembered that I did attempt noise reduction with my Nik plug-in Define, but I have yet to really learn how to use that program--after denoising and sharpening (also with a Nik plug-in that I have yet to really learn), the high contrast areas were scary crunchy.

[The Wirefox]

GIMP 2.8 is the latest version and is much nearer to PS in its UI. You will also need to download UFraw unless you plan to use your current raw converter.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using proboards

[janis]

Thanks, Steve. Let me know if you think there is any particular advantage to using UFraw.