We’ll start with the first assignment, which was ‘Adjustments’…
The first thing I noticed is the image appears much brighter in Adjustment 2, the desired image. To remedy this I increased the brightness slightly in keeping with the theme ‘big to small’, as instructed by the book. Setting the brightness to +35 was just enough to allow me to see certain shadows but not too bright. I ticked up the contrast a few notches to keep the road from appearing washed out and containing it’s ‘wet’ look.
The shadows of the image aren’t as dark as they should appear, so I used the Levels command to fix this. On the RGB channel, increasing the minimum value to 16, and lowering the highest value to 221 increases the darkness in the shadows but also the glow the highlights produced.
At this point, I felt I had made some progress so I saved the image as a sort of ‘check point’. I’ve had many (bad) experiences where I get caught up in the ‘editing action’, only unable to revert to my desired spot. I saved this as ‘Adjustment 1 Progress’.
Continuing, I opened up hue and saturation, setting the saturation low and the hue rather high. I thought at the time this would be an appropriate edit, but it was actually the first mistake of many. I couldn’t get the colors properly balanced, so I opened up Color balance instead, only to no avail. Everything seemed off no matter what adjustments I made. Struggling with this for a while, I decided to revert back a few paces, heading back into Hue/Saturation. I enabled the colorize option, setting the hue to 40 and the saturation to 30.
It looks decent but it’s not as good as I’d like it to be, so I step back into the Color Balancer and increased from cyan to red & yellow to blue, ever so slightly. It’s still way off, so I figure it may just be best to start a clean slate and restart, after all, this is a learning process!
I reload both images (scrapping my ‘progress’), this time I set the Levels to 10, 1.13 and 183, respectively. This gives me a much more appropriate pallete of colors to work with. I realized I should have set the brightness up a notch beforehand (‘big to small’), so I do that quickly, increasing it just a few notches, as well as the contrast. The brightness is set to +10 and the contrast to +20.
Opening up Hue/Saturation, I set them to 40 and 25 respectively to get a more desired hue. The image was a bit to yellow for my tastes, so I opened up the Color Balancer and made the following adjustments ; +8 towards red, +3 towards green, and +10 towards blue. The final result is about as good as I can get it with my current understanding. I’ve spent several hours on just this one adjustment, jumping around, trying new things but I obviously have only documented several failed attempts, and my latest ‘success’. The image is acceptable, but what bugs me the most is the ’50’ on the light posts. Somehow the yellow 50 is turning a shade of blue and I can’t figure out how to keep this from happening.
The Results:
The 'Colors' project I was a bit more comfortable with...
I used the Adjustments Match color and set the luminance and intensity to be comparable with the desired image. After that, I used Saturation to remove some of the orange from the image and also increased the Hue to correct the lighting. Bear with me, but according to my notes I then attempted to use the Levels command to increase the depth of the blue on the window. This didn't work out and a failed attempt at using variations results in me going to the color balancer. The Variations is a really nice tool, but it is way too 'specific' in altering an image it seems. In the color balancer I fiddled with the bars until I got the blues and greens in a way I liked them. Right now I am hating myself because I had written up an equally lengthy and detailed account of my progress through 'Colors'. I used a new image hosting site to try and include thumbnails in the blog but it gave me an error, deleted a piece of the HTML and also half my write-up. Tomorrow, I'm hoping that I can give this another shot with a rested mind at work and turn in something maybe better, late.
The results:
I’m hoping the next online class, tomorrow, John will be able to give us some insight on his process on these adjustments. The concepts of adjusting brightness, contrast, levels, using curves and histograms, as well as hue and saturation, are like wet cement in my head right now, flimsy, but somewhat concrete, even though I have watched the videos and read the chapter twice now. I spoke with a distant friend who works in the graphic design industry and asked him about the difficulty of an assignment like this for a beginner and he said my results were certainly decent for someone who has never used Photoshop before. Even though he said that, it still didn't make me feel better about my results. Either it’s my brain demanding more explanation, or simply the combination of a long day and exhaustion. Regardless of my frustrations, I have gained from these chapters a basic understanding for adjusting color, hue, and contrast. I’m hoping improve my grasp of these concepts throughout the semester and into a possible career in graphic or web design...
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