HSL/Greyscale Tab and more....
Lots of pictures to show for this week's homework. I was able to use two of my own, but I had to use three of Ron's photos. That was probably because I still don't understand the nuances of using the Split Toning Tab in ACR. You will see what I mean later on.
HSL/Greyscale Tab Used for Greyscale
I took a photo of an old building sitting on a vacant lot several years ago, prior to its being demolished. The location is Chandler, Arizona, and there is now a shopping center on this property.
In my mind, this was an old farmhouse occupied years ago by some of the earlier families in the valley. My goal on this photo was to turn it into greyscale, recrop, and eliminate the "newer" buildings that distracted from the structure.
I used the HSL/Greyscale Tab to convert to greyscale, and then I used the Parametric Tone Curve to effect an s-curve on the image to add more emphasis to the shot.
I recropped the image, and used the Clone Tool to remove all the telephone wires (visible at 100 %, but not in these web page photos) and the buildings in the background. I also cloned some of the grass from the right side of the building over onto the left side to replace the removed warehouse. That gave me a more realistic horizon line. This is my finished image.
HSL/Greyscale Tab Used for Color Adjustments
My next photo is a shot of a cactus in my neighbors yard. And no, I did not want to take the time to clone out the water meter access hole in the "yard". Out here, we mostly have stones filling our property, and we call them "yards". lol. What am I suppose to say? Rock gardens? The rocks cover every square inch of the property (except for the plants and trees). All for conservation of water. We are on drip systems out here.
The changes I made to this shot are very subtle, and some may not show up on the web site. In order to make use of the HSL Tab, I zoomed into 100% and adjusted the colors based on changing the cactus to less yellow with orange overtones and a little more green. The yellow cast seemed inherent in the shot within the cactus, but was not there in real life. I also wanted the cactus to "be" greener, so that's how I made it. Ah, the power of Photoshop.
I found it interesting that I needed to increase the Orange hue toward the Yellow and yet reduce the Saturation of the Orange. But it gave me the best color. The increase in the Green Hue and the increase in the Green Saturation seemed to follow naturally. The other thing that I did on this photo was to introduce some sharpening using the Detail tab.
The following two close ups show the effect of the sharpening. Here is a before closeup.
And here is the closeup after sharpening. I think it made a lot of difference.
This is my final version of the cactus after changing the Hue/Sat, sharpening, and cropping the image.
Split Toning Tab
The next two photos take advantage of the Split Toning Tab in the ACR. This is Ron's before photo.
This was an exercise in manipulation. I don't know the tool well enough to know what it can do for me, so I had no real objective for this lesson. I played around with many, many settings on the sliders, and finally stopped. I increased the luminescence of the Blue color just as Ron did, to emphasize the difference between the sky and the rest of the photo. Then I adjusted the colors until I got a two tone complement that was ok. Not great, but ok. I changed the Balance slider until the house siding served as the transition point between the color I chose for the sky and the color for the shadows (the ground).
Even though the shadow color was sitting on blue, I suspect that the yellow sky highlights cast caused the grass in the shadows to take on that green color. I rather liked the end result.
Black and White Split Toning
I went with Ron's photo for this section. This was a marvelous black and white rendering of his initial photo.
I changed the settings many times and never got anything that I thought was to my liking. I could have gone really dramatic for the color, but that was not what I wanted.
The end result was the following. The blue may still be a little too saturated, but I hesitate to have it wash out too much. This is, however, an example of how to apply the split tone tab in ACR. It seems like a powerful tool. And perhaps some day I can use it effectively.
Vignetting
The last photo was also from Ron's collection, and showed an example of vignetting from a wide angle lens. The dark corners of the photo are obvious.
I applied the lens adjustments with the Vignette Tab. I selected an Amount of +61 with Midpoint of 51 on my first pass by adjusting visually, and could have kept with that. There was only a slight difference between Ron's setting and mine, so I went with his.
I also wanted to emphasize more of the highlights and shadows in the photo, so I applied an s-curve using the Parametric Tab. That gave the photo more intensity.
The final version follows.
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This was an interesting lesson, and it showed the suprising power of the ACR software. The biggest surprise to me was the ability of the ACR to adjust individual hues in a photo while still in its RAW state.
