optimizing

The Method

1. Download and open the image (below) 'lukeraw_medium.jpg' (140k)

2. Go to 'Layers - New Adjustment Layer - Curves'.
This will bring up this dialoge box (below). Just click 'Enter'
or press Okay.

3. Adjust the Curves line to give you an outcome like this.

Here we are looking to lighten the image overall by the
central dot, the lower dot affects the shadow density
only, the upper dot affects the highlight areas. Don't
worry that the windows are burnt out, we will
fix this in the next step. Just click Okay to commit.

4. Now you choose your Brush Tool (B). Make sure that you
have black and white selected as the colours in the Tool Bar,
press 'D' in not, the 'X' to bring black to the top (below left).

'D' defaults to B/W, 'X' toggles between black & white.

5. What we will do now is bring back the blue window
detail. Using your Brush (abover right) , we will paint in the window, make sure that black is the top colour on the tool
bar. Notice the mask in he Layer palette? this shows you
what you are painting.

The beauty of this method is that you can make mistakes
and it will not matter. Simply click 'X' to change the top
colour to white and go over the area you want to bring
back. You can even change the pressure of your brush.

.

OPTIMIZATION - Getting the best out of your imagery All images © by Jon Davison 2005. Optimizing pretty much means 'getting the best possible outcome', or cleaning up your images. You need to do this for a number of reasons; (1) Colour casts. (2) Dirt or dust on the CCD. (3) Uneven exposure. (4) Reciprocity failure, or (5) converting the image for press or internet delivery. In this tutorial we will remove an unwanted colour cast and adjust an uneven exposure. I took this image here of my son in the back seat of a Cessna. Two things here need adjusting, a) the colour cast from the green /blue ocean beneath us, as we had the door removed, b) he is underexposed compared to the bright window illumination as I did not use a flash light to balance the lighting. There are a number of ways to do this such as using the Highlight/Shadow command, but here we will look at the Adjustment Layers method. Above left: Original frame as taken. Above right: Final image - optimized.
The Method 1. Download and open the image (below) 'lukeraw_medium.jpg' (140k) 2. Go to 'Layers - New Adjustment Layer - Curves'. This will bring up this dialoge box (below). Just click 'Enter' or press Okay. 3. Adjust the Curves line to give you an outcome like this. Here we are looking to lighten the image overall by the central dot, the lower dot affects the shadow density only, the upper dot affects the highlight areas. Don't worry that the windows are burnt out, we will fix this in the next step. Just click Okay to commit. 4. Now you choose your Brush Tool (B). Make sure that you have black and white selected as the colours in the Tool Bar, press 'D' in not, the 'X' to bring black to the top (below left). 'D' defaults to B/W, 'X' toggles between black & white. 5. What we will do now is bring back the blue window detail. Using your Brush (abover right) , we will paint in the window, make sure that black is the top colour on the tool bar. Notice the mask in he Layer palette? this shows you what you are painting. The beauty of this method is that you can make mistakes and it will not matter. Simply click 'X' to change the top colour to white and go over the area you want to bring back. You can even change the pressure of your brush. .	6. Now click 'Co-E' to flatten your two layers into one. Now we need to do another Ajjustment Layer to remove the overall green colour cast. 7. Now go 'Layers - New Adjustment Layer - Selective Colour '. The reason we use this method is that we need to bring back some of the green into the headphones. So start with the Red's and remove Cyan and bring up Yellow. Then Yellow, take out Cyan. Greens - remove Magenta and Cyan and a bit of the Yellow. Neutrals, take out say 5% of Cyan and ass +2% Yellow. This should give you a result as below. Notice how the headphones are now neutral. Here is where we bring them back. 8. With your Brush 'B' selected (with black as top colour) just paint in the headphones. Use white 'X' if you make a mistake and want to correct it. Note the layer mask above the background image with just the headphones painted in. This is about it, the image is now cleaned up or 'Optimized'. Back to main Photoshop page