Class Week 3: more of week 1&2, emphasis on specular highlights

I was rather disenchanted (to put it nicely) with Week 3 of my "Digital Darkroom" class. We did not learn any new tools and a certain snobby little student (... me) felt that this particular class was basically wasting time. All we did in class was more selections, more cloning, more brightening/darkening and contrasting. Sigh. Practice is good, yes. But, I need SOMETHING new to keep me interested.

I also had Words at one point with the teacher. He started to talk to us about Layers (to manage our cloning and selections that we adjusted) and I eagerly latched onto this. I am ALL about organizing my work. Well, I am working in CS4, and he is in CS3. The directions he gave about cloning from our layers were not working for me. I was getting very frustrated with the directions not working. He, on the other hand, was getting very frustrated that I was so focused on LAYERS, and wanted me to "just forget about the layers" and do the actual exercise. At any rate, after a couple rounds of frustrated conversation, he said I was being "too left brained, just try to use your right brain and work with the photo and not the layers." That made me mad.

I do like the instructor, and feel I can learn a lot from him. There is definitely a clash of philosophies, though. The instructor is teaching us how to view imperfections and then enhance photos using an available tool, whereas I am looking to learn how to use Elements or Photoshop. Both are worthy goals and not necessarily at odds with each other, but they are very different approaches.

At any rate, I did walk away from the class feeling like I had a valuable takeaway. He is definitely teaching me to see a photo from the perspective of printing, and more so, from the perspective of enlargement printing. One of our exercises was to remove "specular highlights" from a photograph. Specular highlights are the bright points of light that reflect back from the curve of an object. In this particular example, the subject was standing in front of a bush in the sunlight. Many of the leaves had a tiny point of bright white light in the middle, where the sun reflected to the camera.

The teacher pointed out that this is nothing, really, in a 4"x6" print. It is, however, a severe flaw in a larger print, such as 20"x30". Each tiny point of light can be the size of a dime when enlarged, and that is very distracting. I had never thought of that. It is good for me to develop this eye, as I would like to start enlarging and printing some photos to decorate our house.

So, here is a picture of Elise at the Jamison fountain last summer. I didn't have the patience to remove all of the "specks", but made a good faith effort to improve the photo overall. I removed most of the specular highlights, as well as darkened the greenery some, and lightened Elise (where she was in the shadows) just a tad. In the class, we spent about 5-10 minutes removing specular highlights from the exercise photo. He said when he actually removed the specular highlights from that photo for 20x30 printing, it took a whole HOUR. Wow.

Before:


After:


Note: the removal of specular highlights is MUCH easier to see if you click on the first photograph, which takes you to flickr. Then click the "<-- Newer" link to switch to the "After" photo.

Note 2: I do not actually think this is a good candidate photo for enlargement. It just serves the purpose of the specular highlight removal exercise.