Jez Cunningham wrote:
> Hmm, dunno. Rules? Break 'em... Or I could blur one or the other.
> My next challenge is to make two raw conversions and combine them to
> brighten up the frog and not burn out the lily. Sounds easy but never
> done it before.
>
I suggest that the two RAW conversion approach is overkill for this
image. Looking at image, this is not a very high brightness range
subject, particularly considering the light illuminating it.
Looking at the histogram, there is only a very small bit of clipped
highlight. Just a slight adjustment of the white point (often labeled
'exposure') in conversion should correct that. Even without that, and
working from an 8-bit jpeg, it's not difficult to bring more tonal
detail to the lily while making it less of a hot spot and bring up the
interest level of the frog and pads.
Here's a little experiment in broadening my very limited HTML skills to
show a simple work flow for processing this image. I couldn't figure out
how to make the boxes different colors, oh well
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/JezC/lilypad.htm>.
1 - Original image. Note the tiny bump at the very top of the histogram.
There is a bit of lost detail, but not much. The sharp 'hill' a little
lower down is most of the lily. Convert to 16 bit before going any further.
2 - I've applied only the highlight part of Highlight/Shadow quite
strongly. Notice how it flattens and spreads out the hill and compresses
the lower part of the histogram. How PS decides to allocate the few
values that appear to be maxed out in the histogram, I don't know, but
it manages.
This makes the image very flat/washed out. That's intentional as
preparation for later steps. I think Amount was 50-60, Tonal Width 50
and Radius quite low. Radius is very sensitive for the lily in this
particular image. Small changes make a big differences in the shading of
the petals. Someone else might easily make a slightly different choice.
At this point, I also used Select=>Color=>Highlights & Layer=>New=>Layer
via Copy to create a new layer with the low highlights from the very low
key lily, leave it at the top of the layers and turned off. I know from
experience that I may need it later. If you work with lots of layers,
this can be done later from the S/H layer, if needed.
3 - Here, I've applied both some LCE and Curves adjustments. Notice how
the central part of the histogram is back to looking more like in the
original. I've intentionally let the bottom clip, as I want those dark
areas that have no detail of interest to go black for dramatic effect.
The hill at the top has also reappeared in mure spread out form, giving
nice tonal graduations in the lily petals. The rest of the image now has
much more inner contrast detail, giving it the visual interest to
balance the lily.
4 - Finally, I thought the lily was still just a little too intense in
the overall composition. I turned on the level with just the highlights
from step two and adjusted it's opacity to get the effect I wanted. It
ended up at between 25 and 30%. You can see in the histogram how the
"lily hill" moves just slighly to the left, but still leaves some values
all the way to the end.
I'm sure my result is not quite what anyone else would choose, but I
like it much better than the original. And more to the point, the lily
has been tamed and the elements of the image brought into better tonal
balance without any need to do any fancy multiple conversion blending.
I do occasionally blend images with different exposures when using a P&S
with only JPEG capability. I really don't think it is necessary with RAW
images, no matter what those selling you their technique or software
say. The camera only records 12-14 bits from the sensor. So proper RAW
conversion should allow outputting all of that data in a 16 bit TIFF
without any loss of tonal data at all.
From there on, it's just a matter of redistributing the tonal values as
necessary to fit your own vision of the image. It may, in fact, be
quicker and/or easier to do two RAW conversions and feed them into an
automated merge function/program/plug-in, particularly for someone with
limited editing skills*. I don't know, because I haven't tried any such
tools. My bet is that they will still need work to get everything in place.
Finally, is that stuff behind the frog what I think it is? Anyway, I
took it out of the final image. And what is that thing peeking out under
the lily pad, frog? fish?
Moose
*Well, more limited than mine. There is still a lot I don't know.
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