Humungus' Lightning Bolts - LAB Example

DavidTO · September 30, 2005

humungus wrote:

Please feel free to show me how you would improve & then crop this shot. Its the lightning one i did the other night.

I have sat fooling with it for 3 days but feel its a bit like drinking my fathers home brew when i was 16...after 8 bottles .. it all starts to be the same. Im trying to put more 'mood' into the cloud.

There is real original as the camera saw it (the pinkish one) & one that i toned the temp down on (darker sky shot).

All that is done to them is the standard 25 point sharpening by CS2.

Thanks Gus

K, Gus. I admit to not spending a whole lotta time on this. I'm on my laptop, and compared to the G5/23" display, it's just not as much fun.

EDIT: oops, I forgot to crop!

But here goes:

All done in LAB, here's the curves:

gus · October 1, 2005

Thanks for that david...dont worry im open to any ideas. You put some 'bang' into the clouds though. I started to get some banding in them from over doing it.

Gus

DavidTO · October 1, 2005

Humungus wrote:

Thanks for that david...dont worry im open to any ideas. You put some 'bang' into the clouds though. I started to get some banding in them from over doing it.

Gus

I put markers in the curve in the dark clouds and the light clouds. Then I just made sure that the area between the darkest and lightest clouds was the steepest part of the curve. Maybe you can take that logic and make it even better.

gus · October 1, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

I put markers in the curve in the dark clouds and the light clouds. Then I just made sure that the area between the darkest and lightest clouds was the steepest part of the curve. Maybe you can take that logic and make it even better.

2 hours sleep in 36...i dont think logic exists in my life any more, been out with storm damage. I will certainly try that David...i am ok with the '3 eye droppers' but learning. I will sit with your suggestion & go through it. Thanks heaps.

DavidTO · October 1, 2005

Humungus wrote:

2 hours sleep in 36...i dont think logic exists in my life any more, been out with storm damage. I will certainly try that David...i am ok with the '3 eye droppers' but learning. I will sit with your suggestion & go through it. Thanks heaps.

Get some rest. I think this is an excellent application of the L channel.

BTW, I had to look up Boffin:

boffin |?bäfin| noun informal chiefly Brit. a person engaged in scientific or technical research : a computer boffin. • a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex, arcane, and difficult : he had a reputation as a tax boffin, a learned lawyer. DERIVATIVES boffiny adjective ORIGIN World War II: of unknown origin.

Nikolai · October 1, 2005

Gus,

Humungus wrote:

Thanks for that david...dont worry im open to any ideas. You put some 'bang' into the clouds though. I started to get some banding in them from over doing it.

Gus

Essentially, what David said/did, but also - there is a new post on lab adjustment here on dgrin, which exactly matches your image's problem (cast, etc).
HTH

rutt · October 1, 2005

'Gus, can I get the RAW version.

Also this discussion is perfect for Nik's new Ch. 4 discussioin. Please, can you move it there? Thanks again.

Khaos · October 1, 2005

Here's my go at it.

6x9 crop
Curves in rgb slight S.
Highlight and Shadow work and edge sharpened.

gus · October 1, 2005

rutt wrote:

'Gus, can I get the RAW version.

Also this discussion is perfect for Nik's new Ch. 4 discussioin. Please, can you move it there? Thanks again.

No idea how to get it to you rutt...your welcome to it though. Email maybe ?

Would you want it with the way CS2 saw it off the camera ..ie 25 points on the sharpening ?

Its 6.45 meg in RAW

Gus

gus · October 1, 2005

Khaos wrote:

Here's my go at it.

6x9 crop
Curves in rgb slight S.
Highlight and Shadow work and edge sharpened.

Very nice capt'n K...there is some anger in the clouds now.

DavidTO · October 2, 2005

K, Gus, I took another stab at it. This time I did quite a bit more. Let's see if I can make sense of it.

First off, here's the final result:

As you can see from my layers I had a curve adjustment layer. Here's the curves:

I really tried hard to tone down those magenta lights. There were bugging me.

I then merged visible to a new layer and changed the blending mode to multiply and the opacity to 70%. I didn't like this effect on the whole image, just the clouds, so I painted a quick mask to leave the lower portion of the frame untouched.

I sharpened the L channel. Sorry, I forget how much exactly. I also blurred the A and B channels slightly. 2.5 px, I think.

Then there were two goobers on the left of the frame, I cloned those out.

How'd I do?

gus · October 2, 2005

You did very well mate...i will have to get my book open on merging the images but you have certainly got the sky looking meaner

I am following everyones lead here to learn this for myself.

Gus

rutt · October 3, 2005

Khaos set a high bar here, so I couldn't help but feel challenged. I did color and fixed a few spots which are either sensor dust or rain drops on the lens. I leave the cropping to 'Gus.

I ended up with this version:

My goal was to make the lightning bolts stand out as much as possible and to emphasize the diagonal composition of the bridge and it's interesting structure. The lights on the bridge and road with their lens flare are an important counterpoint to the lightning bolts, so I wanted to emphasize them as well. The original has a warm (magenta-yellow) cast from the artifical lights (and their reflection in the moisture in the air.) That has to go or we'll never get the drama of a nighttime thunder storm.

Here are the steps I followed:

Like Khaos, I started off with shadow/highlight, but with a slight twist. I applied only to the L channel. I just picked up this trick from the LAB book. It forces the adjustment to be color neutral. The reason to precede an application of curves with shadow/highlight is to expand the shadows and highlights into the quartertones and 3/4 tones and give oneself a little room to breath in writing the curves. In the end we want to see more of the bridge structure and more of the details in the bolts and lens flair around the lights. The curves have to be steepend to make that happen. This step widens the section of the curve where that can happen.
L Curve -- This is in the zone, right down the middle, and high (translation for 'Gus, a setup for an easy winner.) The things I want to emphasize in this shot stand out from the background with very high contrast. The bolts and lens flair are bright on a dark background. Ditto for the bridge lights. So all I have to do is take what's already there and make more of it. There is actually no detail inside the bolts or light flairs (yet) so I can pull the light endpoint of the curve inward a bit and then make it as steep as possible all the way through the section which encodes the bridge structure. At that point, I've lost some detail in the foreground greenery, but what was that adding anyway? Other than that, I've made the night sky very dark, which sets off the elements I actually care about.
Like I said, I want this image to look like night, neutral to cool. On the other hand, I want to keep the hot pink lights on the bridge, the hint of dark rust in the bridge structure. The sign in the bridge really can't change color (and get greener or bluer, say) because that's a well known standard color. Insofar as we can see into the greenery in the front of the bridge, it has to be green, not blue. I had to mess around a little to get this, pulling the neutral points of both A and B curves to the cool sides, but setting some anchor points to keep from changing the things I really didn't want to change.
USM in separate lighten and darken layers. I use this technique very often and explained it in detail here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=9739 I used USM parameters 500/0.8/14 and kept the darken layer opacity 100% but made the lighten layer opacity 40%.
HIgh RAdius LO AMount (HIRALOAM) sharpening. This is a trick I think some others are on to and which Dan Margulis has been using recently (it's suggested in his new book.) It can emphasize the contrast of foreground elements against the background (something I really wanted here.) I'm still learning to tune these parameters, but for this image I used the following on the L channel:

At this point I had the following image:

It pretty much achieved the goals I initially set, but I wanted to see if I could get even more drama. In particular, I wanted more blue in the bolts and more pink in the artificial lights. This seemed like a good time to try another new trick from the LAB book. (See my post on it here: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=161622&postcount=3) I made a new layer from the post-LAB curved image and applied very very steep A+B curves, 40+ percent on each end. The curves were not quite symetric. I wanted to get the bolts as blue as possible and the lights as pink as possible and didn't really care about anything else. (You'll see why soon.) I ended up with this:

Then I changed the blending options so that the only impact was to push the A and B channels toward the extremes and only in the lightest colors:

Notice the blend mode is overlay, the opacity is 20%, the L channel is unchecked. The split blend if slider specifies a range though which the blend gradually kicks in.

So that's how I did what I did. What do you think?

TristanP · October 3, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

K, Gus, I took another stab at it. This time I did quite a bit more. Let's see if I can make sense of it.

First off, here's the final result:

How'd I do?

Wow - very dramatic version you did there. I like it.

DRT-Maverick · October 4, 2005

The bridge of Death! You must answer me these questions three!

Anyway, great contrast and composition, again, my lightning photos have been put to shame.

gus · October 4, 2005

Thanks for your time & effort here rutt. I have copied what you did (and the others) for my next shot.

All of you helped me out a lot.

Humungus' Lightning Bolts - LAB Example

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