maarten_gelderman

<p>Hi Dominic,<br>

Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis probably is the book you are looking for. His book Professional Photoshop is also highly recommended. For now, let me try to explain what I did to the pictures.<br>

The one with the doves was most easy. I opened it into Photoshop and than did an auto levels to maximize contrast (its a bit blunt, normally I would do this by hand). Next I opened the curves window and looked where the darkes part of your dove was. I mad this ten units darker. Next I looked where the whitest part of your dove was and made this 15 units lighter. Finally I did an unsharp mask, 120% and 0,5 pixels (with a full sized file the number of pixels probably would have been one or even more). And yes, I did the unsharp mask on a separate layer, which I next set to luminosity mode.<br>

The other image, I converted to LAB. I increased saturation by making the a and b curve steeper and improved contrast by giving the L-curve an S-shape. Finally I applied an unsharp mask to the L-channel (which is more or less similar to setting mode to luminosity in an RGB file).<br>

Hope this helps. Anyway, its good to realise that a camera like the D300 produces "flat" pictures on purpose. Most of the nice professional pictures you see on calendars and in photobooks have undergone this kind of editing. Actually, you'll learn that some quick edits can literally be done in minutes and next may end up using RAW only and setting your camera options on no sharpening, no additional contrast, no additional saturation etc.<br>

It really is great fun,<br>

Maarten</p>

<p>And the other picture, too.<br>

Kind regards,<br>

Maarten</p><div></div>