The primary lesson of week 1 in my "Digital Darkroom" class was to learn how to select just a portion of a picture. We used all the different selection tools, including the various lassos and the quick select. This took the bulk of the class time. In the last half hour, we moved onto actually doing something with our selected portions. In this case, we went into the Layers palette and adjusted brightness and contrast. I practiced this on two different photos from our recent vacation. The first photo is of my cousin Nga, walking my son Nolan, along the edge of Laguna Beach.
Before
After: I lightened her face and hands, and Nolan's entire body.
(Funny, the edit seemed a lot more obvious when I was doing it, but now it's hard to tell the difference.)
One of the points that my instructor has made: Photoshop is used to make the photos look like what you actually saw. In other words, the way the camera sees a scene versus the way the human eye + brain sees the same scene, can be entirely different. Colors can be different, even objects can be different (how many times are we surprised to see a power line running across our picture? Our brain has filtered it out.)
With that perspective, I chose to edit this next photo, of Nolan chasing a spry little bird on the beach...
Before
After: I lightened the bird
Looking good!
ReplyDeleteThese totally remind me of those kids' activities where they're supposed to try and spot 10 very subtle differences between 2 pictures.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think the method of lightening after the fact worked much better in the first picture than trying to meter off the faces would have. No doubt the water would have been totally blown out if you'd tried to compensate for the shadows in the faces. (Jan also recommended a flash for situations like that, which I thought was interesting.)
They both look great!