The Digital Darkroom

Rickster · 01-17-2008, 12:09 AM

I think the Digital Darkroom is every bit as important today as it was when I was slopping chemicals around in my Wet Darkroom of yesteryear. It sure doesn't smell as bad!

Image control is what it was all about in those days and I think that is just as important today. I see so many digital photographers that think they are done with the image after they push the shutter release.

Post your digital darkroom examples of how you recovered a so-so image and in general what steps you took.

I'll start with this image. It was taken last Oct. and I had skipped over it as not being worthy of further work. I revisited the image and after a few minutes in CS3 came up with what I think is an acceptable result. I might revisit it again to add back the foliage I lost to the vertical perspective correction. Here is the before and after ...

After converting the PEF file I did the following in CS3

Rotation - Vertical Perspective - Crop - White Point - Black Point - Gamma - Selective Saturation - Resize - Slight Sharpen

CC welcome. Looking forward to seeing more examples.

distorted_vision · 01-17-2008, 01:00 AM

this is a fantastic idea mate.... very very good idea... nice picture by the way.. the b4 and after are certainly evident!

clarenceclose · 01-17-2008, 08:54 AM

You did this shot justice. The compo is good and the shot well worth recovery.

jshurak · 01-17-2008, 09:18 AM

Oooh I've got a great example. The original was shot with an old p & s (not pentax) at my friends wedding almost a year ago. I was struggling with the incessant auto focus for this shot. Here's the original:

After a decent amount of time in the 'digital darkroom' I was able to save the picture. The fix is nowhere near perfect, but its a huge improvement. Here's the 'fixed' photo:

If memory servers me correctly, the first step was to get rid of those red eyes. Easy enough. Next was to fix the distracting background. Gaussian blur and a little sepia tone did the trick. Although the sepia may be a bit much. Next I applied an Unsharp Mask to sharpen it up a bit. Finally I duped the subject layer and applied a very light gaussian blur and probably set it to screen for a nice soft focus touch. Seems kind of counter-intuitive right?

I plan on giving it to them on their anniversary which...yeek....is in a few days! I still need to do something about that darn flash shadow!

Rickster · 01-17-2008, 09:45 AM

Originally Posted by distorted_vision

this is a fantastic idea mate.... very very good idea... nice picture by the way.. the b4 and after are certainly evident!

Thanks for the support and kind words. By the way, your graffiti art series is really GOOD WORK!

Rickster · 01-17-2008, 09:46 AM

Originally Posted by clarenceclose

You did this shot justice. The compo is good and the shot well worth recovery.

Thank you Clarence. Looks like you're a neighbor! I'm in the Bear Lake area.

Rickster · 01-17-2008, 10:01 AM

Originally Posted by jshurak

I plan on giving it to them on their anniversary which...yeek....is in a few days! I still need to do something about that darn flash shadow!

What PP tools do you have? In CS3 I would use the PEN tool to carefully draw a Path around your couple and then convert the path to a selection to isolate them from the background. You could then work on the shadow with a bit of cloning. Here's an example where the background was very distracting and I did the Pen - Path - Selection thing then completely got rid of the background ...

Here is the original with just resizing ...

You see I got rid of the shadow too!

**J.Scott** · 01-17-2008, 05:47 PM

I shot this picture while in Mexico last year. I liked it because of the small group of people buying fruits and vegetables (who were thankfully ignoring me); the bright red door of the church; the colonial beauty of the architecture of the church and finally the deep blue sky. I disliked it for the weird angles of the church and the seemingly crooked road.

Using 'lens correction' in Photo Shop CS2 I was able to straighten the walls of the church and the angled road curb. It was a combination of both horizontal and vertical corrections that made it all come together. Now I really like the image!

New and improved image.

clarenceclose · 01-18-2008, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by Rickster

Thank you Clarence. Looks like you're a neighbor! I'm in the Bear Lake area.

Greetings.
Have to hook up the dogsled and mush on over sometime for a hike and shoot.

Send me a pm regarding contact info.

Rickster · 01-18-2008, 01:17 PM

Originally Posted by J.Scott

I shot this picture while in Mexico last year. I liked it because of the small group of people buying fruits and vegetables (who were thankfully ignoring me); the bright red door of the church; the colonial beauty of the architecture of the church and finally the deep blue sky. I disliked it for the weird angles of the church and the seemingly crooked road.

Using 'lens correction' in Photo Shop CS2 I was able to straighten the walls of the church and the angled road curb. It was a combination of both horizontal and vertical corrections that made it all come together. Now I really like the image!

Good job on the perspective correction. Great looking old church.

If at all possible I will try to leave more 'space' around images like this that I know will require perspective correction in post processing.

Rickster · 01-19-2008, 07:08 AM

I want to apologize to the forum for posting this in the wrong place. I'd appreciate it if a forum moderator would move the thread to "Post Processing and Software"

-=JoN=- · 01-19-2008, 09:20 AM

moved...

good stuff btw...like the first one....good edits all around

Rickster · 01-19-2008, 10:32 AM

Originally Posted by -=JoN=-

moved...

good stuff btw...like the first one....good edits all around

Thank you for moving the thread Jon.

Thank you for the kinds words too!

Rickster · 01-22-2008, 05:52 PM

Looks like moving the thread was the 'kiss of death' for it.

Come on folks, let see some more examples!

*khardur* · 01-29-2008, 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by Rickster

Come on folks, let see some more examples!

Okay! I like the idea of this thread. I just haven't had time... (aren't we all in the same boat there?) So I'm resurrecting it for you:

top one: unretouched jpg from raw output: (infrared image taken with Hoya R72 filter, white balanced off the clouds, that was the only thing giving a reading at the time)

After converting the RAW, I converted to grayscale using Cybia's Retrograde filter. ($8, though I highly recommend their free version too, called "B&W Plus")

Then I did a little burning in the clouds, a little dodging on the foreground.
Then I wanted to kind of do a "lensbaby" effect, because I'm too damn cheap to buy one, so I feathered an elliptical selection tool (Photoshop Elements) by about 100 pixels, and put the ellipse around the tree. Finally I inversed the selection and did a radial blur, to leave a fairly clean tree with a nice blur all around.