Post Processing Challenge March 2, 2019

"Another weekly challenge.

If, anyone else would like to post next week please give it a go, upload a High resolution jpeg. Just indicate your intentions by Thursday or early Friday.

 

Remember there are no rules you can do what you wish in your interpretation, please can you give information of the steps taken and software used to add interest.

 

It is not meant as a competition just a bit of fun." (Gerald Cafferty)

 

Playa Brava, Punta Colorada, Uruguay.

I'm very interested to see how your software deals with the luminance gradient in the sky and jpeg re-compression. I usually end up with steps (bands) rather than a smooth gradient in these types of image when I take them down to 1000px on the largest side.

good image Punta, and I am curious what others will do. For me I did my usual....LR to crop and adjust shadows, etc. A bit of Tonal Contrast in NIK. I still didn’t like results so I used Cutout filter in PS Elements.

Otherworldly Shore?

 

Nice image. I straightened horizon, then used Topaz Simplify to help smooth water surface texture, adjusted NIK Tonal Contrast and curves, and cropped.

Swimming under the stars.

Punta super image of a nice beach. I would like to visit. All work in Gimp. I used 9 luminosity mask add color and contrast very slowly. Such a nice image did not need much.

Hi Punta, all adjustments in Lightroom 5.7.1. First step was to crop to what I saw has my desired composition. You made reference to the banding around the sun my answer to this was to increase the exposure of the sky, then reducing highlights and opening shadows. Then using adjustment brushes I added blue to the surf the top of the sky and the bottom of the scene.

Great photo and a first PP variation from me. I adjusted the colors (more magenta) in Topaz Adjust and tweaked them a bit with Hue/Saturation. I used Nik Analog Pro to blur the foreground and L/R sides a bit. I brushed over the sun in magenta to match the foreground color better and make the sunlight less intense. Tweaked brighness and contrast and added more grain.

Really nice photo! I found this one challenging—I wanted to figure out a way to use Lightroom to defeat that halo of brown between the saturated yellow and saturated orange in the sky while leaving the sky colors bright. I think the brown halo results from a gamut problem: the color space that jpgs use can’t depict some highly saturated colors. Since Lightroom uses a different color space, that led to the problem that what looked good in Lightroom no longer looked good when I exported it to post the result—I went through 7 iterations, and I’m still not satisfied.

 

Anyway, here’s what I ended up trying. I started off with a radial gradient centered on the sun that increased exposure, temperature, and tint with distance from sun. I’d been planning to then erase the effect from all but the sky, but I decided I liked it in the foreground, too. Next, I added gradients in the two upper corners to further increase exposure and warmth, and also to increase saturation. To deal with the brownish zone between the saturated yellow and saturated orange rings around the sun, I made a strongly feathered adjustment brush that increased warmth and exposure (very slightly) there, as well as drastically reducing sharpness and clarity; I used the same brush again over most the sky beyond the orange ring to better blend the orange with the rest of the sky. The trick of using a -100 clarity and -100 sharpness adjustment brush to blur hard edges is one I often use when I need to even out gradients. It doesn’t solve posterization problems, but it does usually make them less noticeable. But when I exported the result, the brown halo returned. So I made my only global edit: I went into the HSL panel and slightly reduced the orange and yellow saturation so the contrast between saturated and unsaturated bands would be less noticeable, and would—I hoped—bring the intermediate colors back into gamut for jpgs.

 

The final edits were (1) using an adjustment brush to increase clarity and brighten highlights in the foreground and mid-ground water surface (to tie the left side of the frame in with the activity on the right), (2) to hit the wave crest with another adjustment brush to increase clarity and whites to bring out that sparkly back-lit spray, and (3) to increase highlights and saturation in a diffuse foreground zone directly below the sun. Oh yeah, I also straightened the horizon.

All in PSE 14, crop, straighten, convert to b&w, adjust levels, add poster edges (small amount for detail), final adjust light etc.

Most of you are probably too young to remember how movies that were shot in wide formats for movie theatres had to be squished horizontally during the title and credit sections to fit on the television screens of the day. The rest of the film wasn't squished, and if you couldn't see that part, so be it. It just goes to show how important credits are in a movie.

 

I always liked how that looked. One movie in which that compression really impacted me was 'Seconds'; the 1966 SciFi movie starring Rock Hudson.

 

I didn't do much to this image in terms of adjustments other than to straighten the horizon in LR. Then, in PS, I stretched it vertically, cropped to a 1:1ratio, added some credits and stretched them too.

FYI 'C.L.I.U.' stands for Canadian Living In Uruguay.

Another feeble effort. I should have wrapped the can in one bright colour to facilitate masking; but, I didn't.

So-Picture of can of tomatoes (biggest one I had), In PS-text then add as layer on the image of the can. transform-warp- lots of messing with beziers. some clean up with masking, blurring and dodging of the can sides.

 

Not very convincing but I want to get outside. This is the 'End of Summer' weekend here. The kids started school on Friday (yes, but it was March 1st). They can miss a bit of school this week if they can prove that they are involved in Carnival (which runs 40 days here in Uruguay).

Ice Cave

This version is a combination watercolor attempt with a cyan filter applied afterwards plus lots of minor adjustments in PS.

Punta, thanks for the nice image.

Very impressive, @PuntaColorada! I must find out how to do this kind of stuff! Great example!

 

Mike

 

QUOTE="PuntaColorada, post: 5736248, member: 10972232"]Another feeble effort. I should have wrapped the can in one bright colour to facilitate masking; but, I didn't.

So-Picture of can of tomatoes (biggest one I had), In PS-text then add as layer on the image of the can. transform-warp- lots of messing with beziers. some clean up with masking, blurring and dodging of the can sides.

 

Not very convincing but I want to get outside. This is the 'End of Summer' weekend here. The kids started school on Friday (yes, but it was March 1st). They can miss a bit of school this week if they can prove that they are involved in Carnival (which runs 40 days here in Uruguay).

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Picture of can of tomatoes

Really nice, Punta! And if you export, I could use about three cases right about now...

I know I'm very late, having just returned from a short trip to Buffalo, NY (yes, during the winter by choice).

 

Given the above, I prepared a single version only. Initially, in PSE15, I used both the dodging/burning tool and the sponge tool to take my best shot (no pun) at the problem Punta mentioned. Then I solarized the image, followed by an inversion. Next, I again used the sponge tool to desaturate portions of the sky, followed by dodging selected areas of the water. Finally, I used Viveza to reintroduce color to the sun, thereby creating a giant eyeball (hahaha) which is looking down at the people in the water. Finally I sharpened using Output Sharpener.