'Enhancing' Images

Before

After

 

This was something I put together for online learning. No longer great subject matter in this image but the enhancing tactics are still good!

You can view the official Photoshop tutorial in enhancement here. My approach is a little different in that it avoids controls with a lot of artificial intelligence (which gives you some artificial mistakes too) and adjustment layers, mostly because I tend to work with 50-100 megapixel files and have frequent crashing problems if I take that approach. Another reason is that it is just faster to work 'destructively' when you know what you want to do.
Here we have a 10 megapixel image made with an iPhone. The first thing I'm going to do here is open this up in Image>Adjustments>Curves

In the curves graph the mountain peaks represent where your tone is in this image (dark left, light right) and the line represents how you're going to pull/shift those around. The steeper you make the line the more contrast you're adding. Digital images seldom have a dead black, and from working in the darkroom we know we want some pure black to make the most of our tonal scale. By moving the very bottom of the line to the right we will make our darkest tones in the first peak dead black.

To shift tones around further we are going to split this image in two, as we need more highlight detail in sky area but we need to maintain bright whites in the poster. To do this we'll use the lasso tool, the third one down on the far left. With this tool you need to fill in a number in the feather box at the top to transition between these two sections. Here, it's a relatively small 15 pixels. Then we'll trace around the area we want to work on and then open curves again.

Here we want more happening in the highlights, so we'll pull our line down on the right side rather severely, and then add points to straighten it out in the midtones. The main reason to use curves rather than brightness/contrast here is that these sorts of radical manipulations often result in tonal stepping (looks like wood grain, but in the sky) when using slider controls.

Next we'll go to Select>Inverse to work on the rest of the picture, and open Curves again.

Here we want just a touch more contrast so we'll make an 'S' curve that steepens the slope through the mid-tones.
Next we'll address color saturation by going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. There's a new control called 'Vibrance' that combines saturation with warming, but this image already shows too much color shift in that direction as we will see below.

 

Adding +10 here is making the poster more vibrant, but the pink shift in the library reflection gets really distracting, so next we'll address Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.

We're most concerned with mid-tones here so leave that box checked. Start out playing with the Yellow/Blue to see if you need to warm or cool. Next go to Cyan/Red, you almost always need to go in the opposite direction with it. Next fool around with Magenta/Green, often this will be left at '0'. Okay, so the radical shift illustrated above neutralizes most of the pink cast, but also it makes the picture sort of 'blah', and I think some of the source of this pinkness is in the tinting of the Wriston glass. Maybe we'll just back way down on this.

Here the color shift is mildly toned down with +10 Blue and -10 Cyan. 

This is the basic stuff, there may be a couple more things to try here. Because this is an architectural image taken with a phone it may benefit from some sharpening. We'll go to Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen.

Here we choose Lens Blur as we are dealing with a somewhat primitive optic. If there is camera shake in your image from a long exposure the Motion Blur can be very effective. Because of the type in this image we can't get away with much sharpening at all here, but a little bit helps. This is the default setting -50%.

This next move may be a bit questionable. This image has a bit of a casual 'tip' to it that we would expect to find in a hand held camera image. The Perspective Crop tool, hidden under the Crop Tool, can make this image look like it was taken with a view camera.

What we're doing here is making sure the buildings' verticles are parallel to the sides of the picture and making sure that we maintain an even porportion of crop all around to reduce distortion.

Not sure about this final move. There is a charm to the casualness of the tilted perspective, yet as an illustration this is much easier to look at.

For a good explanation of camera settings look at this;

https://streetbounty.com/basic-camera-settings/

Robert Frank

An older doc on Robert Frank that popped-up on YouTube;

 

Sarah Greenough on "The Americans";