I'm walking this way… [Musings on Photoshop]
Image by Erik K Velandnatural hair highlights
This photo is interesting to me in the light of the recent Aperture/Lightroom vs Photoshop debate that has sprung up - especially in the last few days regarding Adobe's no show of a Mac 64 bit version until CS5.
While Aperture (and Lightroom) are fantastic tools for us photographers, and Photoshop still continues to be an invaluable illustrative and artistic tool - the all powerful toolbox it is, there are simply some things that requires Photoshop still even in the field of photography.
This photo is such an example. While local adjustment tools in Aperture (and Lightroom) are available, we are really thrown back to the pre-3.0 Photoshop days here. Namely sans layers. I literally grew up with Photoshop, manipulating my scanned in primary school class photographs in Photoshop 1.0 to humorous effect. And when 3.0 arrived I didn't know how to make heads or tails with layers. This might seem strange to a Photoshop user today - but back then the paradigm shift was so strange to me that I continued to edit images the way I had always done it: Using local adjustments with selections. And I did so for quite some time.
Which brings me back to this image. You would probably need the original image to really appreciate the changes here [edit: Before and after image added to comments below], but for now just trust me when I said that trying to correct the exposure, WB and colour casts that were present on the image as a whole turned out to be nigh impossible. I could either blow out the sky, turn the grass yellow or just live with an almost silhouetted Francesca there.
Or I could use layers.
So I made my overall image adjustments so that the sky and grass were kept nice and balanced as well as a nice summery saturation. This made Frankie here look like a darkened lobster though, as well as having a very ugly blue cast on her dress that made it blend into the sky.
Then I brought it from Aperture in to Photoshop and started masking her out from the background using the magnetic selection tool. I normally use the pen tool for masking, but for this purpose a quick and dirty mask that I could adjust later with brushes was enough. Plus I am lazy.
I now had a layer with just Francesca that I could apply adjustments to separate from the background. I brightened it considerably, but not so much that it looked unnatural. I then had to airbrush out the highlights from the layer that were blown out by the exposure adjustments. A manual highlight/shadows if you wish.
This left the dress, which still had a dark blue cast to it. I masked it out, created a new layer and did the adjustments. It got desaturated and curve adjusted. I then adjusted the blending opacity down to where it looked the most natural.
I don't claim the image to be perfect - far from it - but compared to the original it is night and day, and it saved a picture that would have otherwise been thrown away if Aperture had been my only tool in my toolbox.
And thus concludes my rant/essay. Thank you for your time.
This photo/essay is being discussed:
Critique
Photoshop is not a dirty word
Before and After Photoshop
Photoshop Support Group
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