Greetings. Trying some different ways of applying contrast to bring out the feather detail, tight minimal scope curves adjustments and color contrast... Almost no true neutral colors in this (crank up the saturation to see the broad range of hues). Individual color channel curves and a blended low opacity red and separate green fill layer gets me there. Trying to selectively apply subtle red-white and purple-green color contrast to the luminance contrast in the, er, what once was whites.
Thanks for looking...
Cheers,
-Michael-
Last edited by Michael Gerald-Yamasaki; 03-21-2010 at 10:09 AM.
Reason: typo
Whites look odd to me, with a slight magenta cast, don't know if that's what you wanted. The whites in the upper part seem hot compared to the rest.
AS far as the bird, although this is not Avian :) a lower angle and a head turn would have improved it.
TFS.
Michael, Very interesting approach and I do see lots of details in the whites. Just a few points mentioned by Fabs. The dark spots in the BG are a tiny bit distracting. Thank you for sharing your workflow. Much appreciated.:)
Greetings. Thanks for taking the time to comment... Here's what this is about, er, not sure what I was thinking in posting the singular intermediate image...
When shooting egrets I get a lot of shots like the left-most image, feather detail is present (if you pixel peep) but it is fairly smooth looking. The first image I posted I applied a number of techniques to accentuate the contrast in the whites including adding both red and green to increase color contrast across red to white and purple to green gradients. The center image above is this same contrasty version, but returned to the original hue.
Both the second and third images have luminance range of 50-230, both darker and lighter than the original 70-210. The fourth image is a comparison image of a single curve adding contrast to the original to the same 50-230 range. (did not lift the face a bit as in the others, so it appears darker).
And finally the right-most image is of the center image returned to a 70-210 luminance range... flattening some of the harsher luminance contrast. (I think reducing the hot parts that Fabs pointed out?).
Perhaps, obsessing a bit over detail, but I'm happy with the results.
A Study of Contrast
