AccessPhoto - Everything Photography: Proper Curve Adjustments & Color Enhancement

i'd like to mention this tutorial was written by my local Daily Photoblogger Sam Javanrouh. his [Daily Dose of Imagery] has won numerous titles including the best blog in the world! featured work on BBC, CBC, Space magazine, and held exhibits these past few months. he's got over 15k hit a day. check out his page and leave comments if you enjoyed this tutorial as much as i did. enjoy --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Here’s a brief tutorial on how this image was processed to bring the colours closer to what it actually looked like on location. As you will see below the image that camera originally produced is flat and lacks punch. This is due to technical limitations including the low dynamic range of digital sensors, quality of lens and also the humidity in the air can cause low contrast images. What I'm trying to achieve is to fix these problems by simple adjustments in Photoshop. Here’s the original image out of camera:
Now here's how my adjustment layers look in Photoshop. I'll explain each one briefly:
Starting from the bottom, first I used a curves adjustment to add contrast to the bottom part of the image:
And this is the mask for it:
Now we add contrast to the top part of the image:
With this mask:
And darken the whole image a bit:
Here's what the image looks like after these 3 adjustments:
Now to bring out the colours a little more I used channel mixer with these settings:
And adding a tad more contrast to the whole thing:
Now the photo looks something like this:
At this stage, I use a selective dodge/burn technique to bring out the detail in the shadow areas and darken the highlights. a new empty layer is added and with a %30 soft brush I paint with black on bright areas and with white on dark areas and then set the layer transfer to soft light. This layer looks like this (grey is transparent):
And finally brighten the darker areas a little bit:
And the result should look like this:
As I always mention, this is my way of doing it. There are countless ways of colour correcting and you can achieve similar results with different techniques and applications but the idea stays the same.If you found this useful you might want to check this one as well, if you already haven't.
Modified by Dr. Faramarz at 5:26 PM 8/4/2005
Modified by Dr. Faramarz at 2:18 PM 8/6/2005


Modified by Dr. Faramarz at 2:23 PM 9/5/2005