Understanding Curves
This week's assignment focused on using Curves adjustment layers to improve pictures. The latter part of the lesson asked for examples of applying the Shadow/Highlight filter. My photos this week were obtained from my wife's cousin, who was visiting us this week. She went to Europe in 2006, and returned with some excellent compositions.
Many of her photos were slightly underexposed, and made excellent pictures for Curves applications. The first photo was a statue of that was taken in the shadow with a bright overexposed sky in the background for part of the picture.
The men, while dramatically posed, are very lackluster in this shot. My normal process would be to add a levels layer to adjust the end points (white and black) and then to add a curves layer for emphasizing the contrast. Using Ron's technique I added a curves adjustment layer, shifted the white point, and overlayer an s-curve shape on the remaining curve. It worked nicely.
The curves adjusted photo is shown next.
I selected another picture of a statue, taken inside a building. It too was lacking in definition and slightly dull.
I applied a white point shift and added an s-curve emphasis to the remaining segment.
Again, this approached worked very well as this picture shows.
Shadow/Highlight Filter
For the shadow/highlight filter exercise, I selected a photo taken in a mostly shady condition. The sky is overblown, and the building is shaded. Unfortunately the sky was non-recoverable. But the building came back very nicely.
The building had a strong perspective problem, with the left and right verticals tilting inward. I applied a Transform > Perspective tool and corrected some of the problem by bringing the left wall to a nearly vertical condition. I left the other structures as the perspective correction adjusted them.
I then applied a shadow/highlight filter to a copy of the background layer to try to recover some of the detail in the building. I did not add too much correction on the shadows, but wanted a brighter picture so I added a Levels layer. That created the second picture below.
The final adjustment was adding a curves layer to add some emphasis on the contrast.
In retrospect, the Shadow/Highlight added very little correction to the picture. So this was not a very good example for that application. I probably could have done most of the correction using a single curves layer while playing with the end points. I did a little better correction of a badly contrasted picture using shadow/highlights in another tutorial that I wrote. The photo is low resolution and I was just learning shadow/highlights, so it is not really great. But it does show the process.
Extra Fun Project
I enjoyed working on this last photo. The original picture was taken during an evening dinner, overlooking a wet street with a nicely lit building in the background.
It was a nice shot, but the really bright light in the building on the left and the bland dark wall on the right detracted from the photo. So I cropped the picture to remove those distractions. Then I used selective black point adjustment of the red color within a Curves adjustment layer. It was a fairly small adjustment, but it did help in removing some of the reddish cast from the table cloth area. Then I applied a slight s-curve to the remaining rgb overall curve to add emphasis to the scene.
I really love the final look. And it is an interesting application of the curves adjustment layer that I had not tried before: that is adjusting by individual color component as well as overall rgb. I had done it before within Levels layers, but never within a Curves layer.
I learned some new things about curves in this lesson, and I enjoyed making adjustments to some really captivating photos taken in Europe. Now that I have a resource, you may see more in the future. Great fun.
