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Gordon · January 6, 2006

:thumb you guys convinced me to buy Dan's book and it's been very worthwhile. I'm up to Chapter 4, but before I go much further, I'd thought I'd add a recent before and after attempt - all done with Curve adjustment to L, a & b and some USM.

Anyone willing to give some pointers?

Before

After

DavidTO · January 6, 2006

Looks good!

Do you have a specific question?

Gordon · January 6, 2006

Just throwing it to the masses for comment. I'm personally amazed at the improvement I got from Dan's techniques but I'm a relative beginner at photoshop editing so what looks good to me could be improved on by others..

If I'm on the right track then I'll get on with reading Chapter 5 and beyond..

jfriend · January 6, 2006

Nice: One possible suggestion

Gordon wrote:

you guys convinced me to buy Dan's book and it's been very worthwhile. I'm up to Chapter 4, but before I go much further, I'd thought I'd add a recent before and after attempt - all done with Curve adjustment to L, a & b and some USM.

Anyone willing to give some pointers?

The color enhancement is awesome. It's much improved without being too much (a common mistake when given the new and powerful tool).

Depending upon what you like, you might try a small amount of shadow/highlights. You can recover a bit more visible detail in the foliage on the left half of the image with a small shadow movement and a bit more detail in the clouds with a small highlight movement.

edgework · January 6, 2006

Gordon wrote:

Just throwing it to the masses for comment. I'm personally amazed at the improvement I got from Dan's techniques but I'm a relative beginner at photoshop editing so what looks good to me could be improved on by others..

If I'm on the right track then I'll get on with reading Chapter 5 and beyond..

Don't want to give away the ending, but I'll say that this type of image, with a limited color set, is precisely the kind that can benefit so much from LAB moves. What you've done here is striking. Keep reading. The best is yet to come.

jfriend · January 7, 2006

Played with a little enhancement to the sky

Gordon wrote:

you guys convinced me to buy Dan's book and it's been very worthwhile. I'm up to Chapter 4, but before I go much further, I'd thought I'd add a recent before and after attempt - all done with Curve adjustment to L, a & b and some USM.

Anyone willing to give some pointers?

There are many other ways to accomplish this, but I was playing with some other Margulis techniques on your image and came across one that works here. This is a technique I learned in chapter 16. It actually has nothing to do with LAB, but Dan uses it in his portrait workflow which has other parts in LAB. The idea is to look at the three channels in RGB and see which channel shows really nice contrast for some feature you are trying to enhance. He usually uses the green channel to enhance facial contrast in portraits.

In this photo, I thought that it might be nice to give the sky a little more punch. So, I looked at the three channels. As it turns out, the blue channel is all white (no surprise there) and the red channel has lots of nice contrast between sky and clouds. I guess there's no red in the blue sky, but obviously lots of red in the white clouds.

So, I made a copy of the red channel and pasted it into a new layer above your image. Now you need to play with blending parameters to see if you can make it do anything useful. For portraits, Dan uses luminosity blend mode. That sort of works here, but color burn blend mode works even better on the sky. It deepens the blues nicely. But, it is also affecting the rest of the image. So, I turn to the blend if settings. I make it so that the effect only applies if the underlying layer is mostly blue. This has the effect of limiting the color burn only to the places in the image that are quite blue which, in this image, is just the sky and it's reflection.

Before I really understood Dan's book, I would have used a mask to isolate the sky. This is a great example of how combining channels with blend modes with blend if settings can do really powerful things with no masking.

So, here's what I ended up with:

Gordon · January 7, 2006

Wow...
John,

:wow Many thanks. Your sky enhancement lifts this picture to the next level. As you said, when I tried to get this punch in the sky it badly affected other parts of the picture.

I've got Margulis's book in hand now and thumbing to Chapter 16.

Appreciate all the tips.

jfriend · January 7, 2006

Now add HIRALOAM (chap. 5) to it

Gordon wrote:

John,

:wow Many thanks. Your sky enhancement lifts this picture to the next level. As you said, when I tried to get this punch in the sky it badly affected other parts of the picture.

Taking the previous sky enhancement and adding chapter 5's HIRALOAM contrast enhancement with USM: r=22,a=22,t=0 adds some nice contrast punch to the whole image (slightly reduces a bit of a haze look it had before). It is amazing how many great techniques are in this book.

edgework · January 7, 2006

jfriend wrote:

Taking the previous sky enhancement and adding chapter 5's HIRALOAM contrast enhancement with USM: r=22,a=22,t=0 adds some nice contrast punch to the whole image (slightly reduces a bit of a haze look it had before). It is amazing how many great techniques are in this book.

rutt · January 7, 2006

Good one, John. I can tell you did the same thing I did; skipped ahead to chapter 16. Actually, the luminosity blend layer technique is introduced and explained at some length in chapter 14 and Dan mentions that the red channel is often best for skies. In his advanced course he rubbed this in pretty hard. We spent a whole morning doing B&W conversions and then an afternoon using them as luminosity blend layers.

Chapter 16 is best seen as a the grand finale of the book, bringing all the tools developed in previous chapters to bear on portraits.

jfriend · January 7, 2006

It is a truly amazing book

rutt wrote:

Good one, John. I can tell you did the same thing I did; skipped ahead to chapter 16. Actually, the luminosity blend layer technique is introduced and explained at some length in chapter 14 and Dan mentions that the red channel is often best for skies. In his advanced course he rubbed this in pretty hard. We spent a whole morning doing B&W conversions and then an afternoon using them as luminosity blend layers.

Chapter 16 is best seen as a the grand finale of the book, bringing all the tools developed in previous chapters to bear on portraits.

Thanks Rutt. That makes sense that it came from a chapter before chapter 16. I remembered it from 16 because that's where I really started using it on my own images as I tried it on some of my own portraits.

I've actually been through the whole book 3 times now and have practiced on many images. That seems to be what it takes in order to really make the techniques your own and be able to depart from the recipes and solve unique problems using the toolset. I've learned more from his book than all the other 30 books on photography or PS that I have on my shelf.

It struck me here when I was playing with sky enhancement on Gordon's image that there's probably a correlation between the B&W filter techniques that Ansel Adams used to enhance contrast of B&W skies or foliage and the channel blending techniques we're using today in PS to do the same thing. In other words, it's probably the same science that led him to take a B&W shot in Yosemite with a particular colored filter on the camera as it is for us to pick a particular channel to blend with. Boy, how much easier it is for us. We can try 20 different things in a few minutes. He had to "know" what the result was going to be.

rutt · January 7, 2006

jfriend wrote:

Thanks Rutt.

Great post, John. Relates to a lot of things I've been thinking.

jfriend wrote:

I've learned more from his book than all the other 30 books on photography or PS that I have on my shelf.

Consider taking his course. I've done it twice and it was really worth it.

jfriend wrote:

It struck me here when I was playing with sky enhancement on Gordon's image that there's probably a correlation between the B&W filter techniques that Ansel Adams used to enhance contrast of B&W skies or foliage and the channel blending techniques we're using today in PS to do the same thing. In other words, it's probably the same science that led him to take a B&W shot in Yosemite with a particular colored filter on the camera as it is for us to pick a particular channel to blend with. Boy, how much easier it is for us. We can try 20 different things in a few minutes. He had to "know" what the result was going to be.

I've been thinking about this and considering starting a thread on the topic. It's really amazing how the classic film B&W photographers used filters and different kinds of film to do what we can do so easily in post today. I suppose it really means that we should expect much more from today's B&W conversions than from an Adams or a Cartier-Bresson. Or Bradford Washburn, do you know his work?

We should expect more. But I don't think we get it very often.

Have you read the chapter "Friend and Foe in Black and White" from Professional Photoshop. If so, when did you read it last?

jfriend · January 7, 2006

Please do start a thread...

rutt wrote:

Great post, John. Relates to a lot of things I've been thinking.
Consider taking his course. I've done it twice and it was really worth it.

I would really enjoy it. I'll have to see when it's in my part of the country next. I am only a hobbiest so it's a little hard to find the time.

rutt wrote:

I've been thinking about this and considering starting a thread on the topic. It's really amazing how the classic film B&W photographers used filters and different kinds of film to do what we can do so easily in post today. I suppose it really means that we should expect much more from today's B&W conversions than from an Adams or a Cartier-Bresson. Or Bradford Washburn, do you know his work?

We should expect more. But I don't think we get it very often.

I don't know Washburn or Cartier. I agree that we should expect more these days. I wonder if it's because B&W just isn't as prominent an art form as it once was so it doesn't attract the quantity of talented artists.

rutt wrote:

Have you read the chapter "Friend and Foe in Black and White" from Professional Photoshop. If so, when did you read it last?

I got Professional Photoshop about a month ago and have read parts of it, but I, myself, have not been into B&W so I didn't read that chapter yet. My appreciation for how the old timers used a selection of filters and film and photo paper and different types of development to produce great B&W contrast comes from reading books about how Ansel Adams did it.

Please do start a thread on the topic and I'll jump right in.

rutt · January 7, 2006

jfriend wrote:

I don't know Washburn or Cartier.

Full stop. Bradford Washburn is one thing, but Henri Cartier-Bresson is another. Drop whatever it is you are doing and google him. There is a thread about him on dgrin, but a lot of the image links have broken, sadly. But look at this post and make a quick visit to Amazon or your local bookstore.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is my all time favorite photographer

Some people don't agree with me, but a lot of people do. You are missing something great if you don't know his work

jfriend wrote:

I got Professional Photoshop about a month ago and have read parts of it, but I, myself, have not been into B&W so I didn't read that chapter yet.

Read it. It will give you an even greater appreciation of what the great B&W photographers accomplished. Plus, as you have discovered, being able to make good B&W conversions can help your color images.

jfriend wrote:

Please do start a thread on the topic and I'll jump right in.

I think you said it very well. Maybe we should get a moderator to snip off the last few posts here and put them in their own thread?

edgework · January 8, 2006

jfriend wrote:

Please do start a thread on the topic and I'll jump right in.

I think there are two different directions to go with a thread like this. On the one hand, there is the Margulis approach, which is to modify the BW image so that it communicates on its own terms the same drama and effect of an original color image.

But there is also the Ansel Adams approach, which owes no allegiance to any color representation, that sees the BW image not as a translation but an original piece, free to go where it wishes. This approach can be applied to conversions, of course, resulting in images that might not communicate the same effect as the color, but which can create effects that color cannot.

The techniques and concerns are not the same, depending on what the priorities are. Both need to be addressed, and the difference between them emphasized.

Very little that has already been discussed in the LAB threads would be inapplicable in such a thread, it seems to me.

rutt · January 8, 2006

edgework wrote:

IOn the one hand, there is the Margulis approach, which is to modify the BW image so that it communicates on its own terms the same drama and effect of an original color image.

But there is also the Ansel Adams approach, which owes no allegiance to any color representation, that sees the BW image not as a translation but an original piece, free to go where it wishes.

I disagree. JFriend's original point is that in the days of B&W film, people had to do their "channel mixing" at shoot time using filters and differnt types of film. Today we can do all that they could do and more in post processing. Dan's B&W conversion toolkit includes basically everything Adams had and much more (Adams had no blend-if options, for example.) Go reread "Friend & Foe in Black and White". It's a masterpiece, one of the best things Dan ever wrote, IMHO. Dan's real point is that we get to decide which shade of grey each color maps to in the conversion. The B&W photographers were very aware of this issue. Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote this in The Decisive Moment in 1952:

Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote:

Black and white photograpy is a deformation, that is an abstraction. In it all values are transposed; and this leaves the possibility of choice.

OK, given that we have so much better tools today for B&W the amazing thing is how well the classic B&W photographers did. That's the point.

edgework · January 8, 2006

rutt wrote:

I disagree.

Go reread "Friend & Foe in Black and White". It's a masterpiece, one of the best things Dan ever wrote, IMHO.

OK, given that we have so much better tools today for B&W the amazing thing is how well the classic B&W photographers did. That's the point.

I'm not sure we disagree at all. I was speaking to intent, not process. Thinking of the classic case of purple blossoms against green foliage: perfectly understandable in color but a confusing mess in Photoshop's stock grayscale conversion which sees both as the same shade of gray. Dan's approach, using the techniques of the old masters, and more, is still essentially untilitarian: he wants the BW to be able to convey the same kind of information as the original color shot. And, yes, a photogapher shooting that bush with B&W film might well use filters to achieve the save effect, for the same reason. And, yes, we have more possibilities with Photoshop. But Dan's approach is one of compensation: how to prevent B&W's natural tendency to crush information that color is able to provide. The goal is that of a photo-journalist—making certain that what is conveyed is what is actually there.

When I look at an Ansel Adams print, I get no sense of photo-journalism any more than I get a feeling of astronomical accuracy from Van Gogh's "Starry Night." B&W images can distort in both directions; obliterating detail that should be there, but also adding an element that pushes past the reality of whatever original it derives from. At what point does a luminosity blend of the Red channel cease being a technique for capturing relevant detail in the sky, and become, instead, a means for inserting drama, stark contrast and emotion that may not have been present, either in the original color shot, or at the site of the photograph? Dan doesn't go there: he's a master mechanic writing for other mechanics. The old masters, on the other hand, lived there.

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