Atherton & District Amateur Photographic Society

For the photographers that have a nice picture but have difficulty editing it in Photo-shop, then why not upload your image and let others have a go and see what can be done. To start things off please see what you can do with this image.

It would also be helpful if you say what you did to to it.

Hi Mark

Here you go.....
Here is what I did.....
In Photoshop CS5, using the icons on the bottom right of the screen I clicked on the Adjustments Layer Icon (circle half black/half white) and clicked on Brightness / Contrast
I decreased the brightness to -10 and increased the contrast to +50
I then clicked on the Adjustments Layer icon again - this time clicking on Levels
I moved the dark triangle to the right slightly to 5
I then noticed a couple of darker patches in the grass on the bottom right of the screen so I cloned these out to make the grass look more even
I then selected the sky using the quick selection tool - I feathered this selection to 1.0
Back to the Adjustments Layer icon and Levels, this time I increased the darkness (the black triangle) and moved it to read 111
I re-selected the selection, this time using inverse so the bottom half of the screen was selected
I had to flatten the image at this point because I wanted to sharpen just the ground and house
I clicked on Filter (at the top of the screen), Sharpen / Unsharp Mask
I set the Amount to 50 and the Radius to 30 - clicked on OK
I deselected the selection by clicking ctr +D

I then noticed a couple of dust spots in the sky which weren't visible when the sky was light but because obvious when I darkened it a bit. For the top two spots I used the healing tool using a size to just cover the spots but for the bottom spot the healing tool didn't work the same so I used the clone tool instead. Using a brush size slightly bigger than the spot, I set the opacity to 70% and the flow to 66%, I had to click over the spot a couple of times to make it disappear

Then using the burn tool (icon with a hand) and a brush size of around 130px / exposure of 8%
I brushed lightly around the edges of the image to make a slight vignette effect to try and keep the eye focused on the house

I didn't crop anything as I thought the composition was ok as it was.

Tracey

Thought I'd do something a bit different, converted to mono using NX2, added a bit of grain, reduced the contrast, spot darkened the sky top left to give the approaching storm effect.
Eric.

My attempt. Buildings and clouds, I do like them in black and white.

This is one of my favourite techniques, making pseudo-infra-red images.
1. Levels to adjust image brightness and contrast
2. Channel Mixer - set Monochrome and whack up the red and green channels, reduce the blue channel to virtually nothing. Adjust red and green to suit, red in particular will control contrast. Green will control how white the foliage becomes.
3. Hue/Saturation - optional step - black and white didn't look enough for this, so I used the Colourise button and made the hue 25, reduced the saturation to taste.
4. Resized to 800 pixels wide and composition modified by using the crop tool
5. Save As

I edited the image in Lightroom. I hit the black and white button and then cropped, played with the sliders for exposure and tones and added a vignette. Changed the image size in Photoshop.

1) Basic Levels adjustment to add contrast
2) Clone out 5 sensor dust spots in the sky
3) Crop out the darker grass at the bottom of the frame (whilst retaining the original 3:2 aspect ratio)

mark dyson wrote: why not upload your image and let others have a go and see what can be done.

And if anyone would like to start a new thread with one of their own images this could hopefully become a regular feature on the forum.

It would be very helpfull to see and have explained some portrait processing.

Regards

Shaun

Stbourne wrote: It would be very helpfull to see and have explained some portrait processing.

Hi Shaun

Do you want to post a portrait for us to have a play with?

This is an excellent book for anyone looking to improve their portrait retouching - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0321725549/?tag=paujon-21
(I learned a lot of useful things from it.)

Tried this in http://www.pixlr.com

Used curves, took the third line (left to right) up a bit to boost the highlights, took the first square down to darkn the lowlights and increase contracst.
Very lightly sharpened all the brickword.Very lightly dodged some of the sky.

I had a play in CC - using the default image sharpening on the whole image
then I Duplicated the layer, selected the Farmhouse with the lasso tool - feathered the selection, brightened & sharpened it some more ...
Duplicated that layer and then converted it to mono, edge masked it, sharpened it some more, then reduced the opacity of that layer so it still looks as though it's a colour photo

it won't reupload so pasting an image shack link



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