You all know by now that I am trying to sell some of my stuff simply to feed my habit. I want to be able to buy a new lens if I want one. I have a night shot of Cincinnati with the "C" in red lights. No matter what my skill set tries I can't POP the "C" enough for my satisfaction.
You, O knowledgeable ones, please tell me how to accomplish this in either Lightroom (I've tried upping the red) or photoshop.
Thank you!!!!
You could try in LR to use one of the adjustment brushes just on the C. Either exposure or clarity? Have a play ... you can either try one at a time or you can stack them too by choosing a "new" brush. You can also turn off the dot for all brushes except the one you are using so it's not covered in annoying dots lol. That's down under the shot... I think it says always, never, etc.. it's a drop down thing.
@cdonohoue In LR you can adjust that... I'd probably do clarityy, exposure and you can choose colour and adjust the colour just on that spot... all with the adjustment brush.
@cdonohoue OK. The problem here is that the lights of this sign have been overexposed. This isn't an uncommon issue when shooting city lights at night, and usually indicates that either that the sign/light in question is extremely bright compared to everything else in the scene, or you were shooting a bit too late (and had to use a longer-than-ideal exposure to get detail in the buildings, because there wasn't much ambient light left to light them up).
The camera deals with overexposure differently to the human eye. When the human eye is overwhelmed by the brightness of something, we lose detail, but we retain colour information -- so although something looks so bright we can't see the structure of it, we can still clearly identify exactly what colour it is. The camera, on the other hand, will lose colour detail when something is overexposed. (This is also the same reason why it's very easy to turn a blue sky white by overexposing, whereas a blue sky never looks white to the eye, even if we've just come out of a dark room and are squinting).
You can see exactly the same effect in my street shot here -- notice how the centre of the traffic lights are totally white:
This is why a simple underexposure and saturation correction will not work. The centre of the red light has been captured as pure white by the camera, and there is no colour detail there. By reducing the exposure, we turn the white into grey, and when we apply saturation to grey, it stays grey.
What we need to do is replace the lost colour information in this section of the photo -- effectively make the white areas red again, so that we can then apply saturation adjustments as required.
This is a correction that I, personally, am not able to do in Lightroom. Lightroom does have the ability to add colour with the adjustment brush, but for me, it only tints the area very slightly, meaning that to get a strong red result, you will need to do severe additional manipulation to the area. For me, the results look overprocessed and are hard work. Others may have better luck -- I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I can't do it.
For me, this was an easy manipulation best done in Photoshop. To start with, I wanted to isolate the section of the image we were interested in (the red 'C'), so I zoomed in 100% and grabbed the Quick Selection Tool (keyboard shortcut 'w'). Because I was using the low-res version from your post, I had to shrink the brush size down to 4 pixels wide, so that the brush was narrower than the sections of the 'C'. I then quickly painted over the 'C' with the brush, to make a rough selection -- the quick selection brush does most of the hard work and finds the edges:
(Click for full-size)
Once I'd got my rough selection, I wanted to refine the edge. We are going to be applying colour that wasn't there before, so we want a good edge to our selection, otherwise it's going to spill out and become obvious that it's been painted on. To do this, I went to the Select menu and chose 'refine edge'.
By changing the view mode to 'on white', we can very clearly see that our selection is good, but not perfect:
We can now use the tools in this window to improve the selection. The really awesome tool here is the radius slider under 'edge detection'. As we slide this across (small adjustments only), you can see that the selection alters to more accurately select all the areas of the 'C' and none of the background. For me, the best value was a radius of 1 pixel, but on the original, high resolution image, you'll probably find the best value is larger. You can see the changes with the view mode set as 'on white', so it's fairly easy to hone in on the best value.
Once you've done this, you can also add a very small feather to smooth the edge (a value of around 0.5 pixels works for me, but you can probably increase that to 2 or 3 pixels on the full-res image). You can see our selection is now much better:
(Compare with full-size version of previous image)
Now we have our selection, all that remains is to add colour to it. There are various ways that this can be done (including simply getting a red paintbrush!), but the one I find most useful is the hue/saturation adjustment. You can either apply this as an adjustment layer (which I'd recommend as you can edit it later), or simply go to the Image menu, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation, which is what I'll do here, as it's a bit easier to see what changes I'm making.
The key option in this tool (for our current needs) is the 'colorize' checkbox -- this means that instead of altering the existing colour, we will apply new colour. Check this box and you'll see the 'C' immediately goes yellow -- neat, but not quite what we're looking for.
After clicking the colorize box, the first thing to do is to drop the lightness slider, so that our colour becomes deeper and stronger -- a value of about -35 works well for this photo. Then grab the hue slider and move it around to find the exact colour you want. A value of '360' works well for me, but you can experiment. Finally, we want to increase the saturation to strengthen the red still further. Be careful not to go too far -- we want to keep some texture, otherwise it will look obviously fake. A value of about 60 works well for me on this photo.
And that's it! Hit OK, clear the selection, and you'll have the result I showed above. It takes a long time to write out (and to do the first time), but it's a fairly simple modification that you can do in under a minute once you're familiar with the tools in question. And as with anything in Photoshop, there's undoubtedly several more ways to achieve the same effect -- this is just the one that made sense to me.
Let me know if you have any questions or get stuck!
@abirkill Thank you so much! I am going to have to figure out how to save all of this as a tutorial to keep. I love night shots - never got fixated on a color before but I needed that C to be RED! Thanks for your generosity. I love 365ers!
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Here's the shot @abhijit
try cropping the image (left size) so it is not in the middle
The camera deals with overexposure differently to the human eye. When the human eye is overwhelmed by the brightness of something, we lose detail, but we retain colour information -- so although something looks so bright we can't see the structure of it, we can still clearly identify exactly what colour it is. The camera, on the other hand, will lose colour detail when something is overexposed. (This is also the same reason why it's very easy to turn a blue sky white by overexposing, whereas a blue sky never looks white to the eye, even if we've just come out of a dark room and are squinting).
You can see exactly the same effect in my street shot here -- notice how the centre of the traffic lights are totally white:
This is why a simple underexposure and saturation correction will not work. The centre of the red light has been captured as pure white by the camera, and there is no colour detail there. By reducing the exposure, we turn the white into grey, and when we apply saturation to grey, it stays grey.
What we need to do is replace the lost colour information in this section of the photo -- effectively make the white areas red again, so that we can then apply saturation adjustments as required.
This is a correction that I, personally, am not able to do in Lightroom. Lightroom does have the ability to add colour with the adjustment brush, but for me, it only tints the area very slightly, meaning that to get a strong red result, you will need to do severe additional manipulation to the area. For me, the results look overprocessed and are hard work. Others may have better luck -- I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I can't do it.
For me, this was an easy manipulation best done in Photoshop. To start with, I wanted to isolate the section of the image we were interested in (the red 'C'), so I zoomed in 100% and grabbed the Quick Selection Tool (keyboard shortcut 'w'). Because I was using the low-res version from your post, I had to shrink the brush size down to 4 pixels wide, so that the brush was narrower than the sections of the 'C'. I then quickly painted over the 'C' with the brush, to make a rough selection -- the quick selection brush does most of the hard work and finds the edges:
(Click for full-size)
Once I'd got my rough selection, I wanted to refine the edge. We are going to be applying colour that wasn't there before, so we want a good edge to our selection, otherwise it's going to spill out and become obvious that it's been painted on. To do this, I went to the Select menu and chose 'refine edge'.
By changing the view mode to 'on white', we can very clearly see that our selection is good, but not perfect:
We can now use the tools in this window to improve the selection. The really awesome tool here is the radius slider under 'edge detection'. As we slide this across (small adjustments only), you can see that the selection alters to more accurately select all the areas of the 'C' and none of the background. For me, the best value was a radius of 1 pixel, but on the original, high resolution image, you'll probably find the best value is larger. You can see the changes with the view mode set as 'on white', so it's fairly easy to hone in on the best value.
Once you've done this, you can also add a very small feather to smooth the edge (a value of around 0.5 pixels works for me, but you can probably increase that to 2 or 3 pixels on the full-res image). You can see our selection is now much better:
(Compare with full-size version of previous image)
Now we have our selection, all that remains is to add colour to it. There are various ways that this can be done (including simply getting a red paintbrush!), but the one I find most useful is the hue/saturation adjustment. You can either apply this as an adjustment layer (which I'd recommend as you can edit it later), or simply go to the Image menu, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation, which is what I'll do here, as it's a bit easier to see what changes I'm making.
The key option in this tool (for our current needs) is the 'colorize' checkbox -- this means that instead of altering the existing colour, we will apply new colour. Check this box and you'll see the 'C' immediately goes yellow -- neat, but not quite what we're looking for.
After clicking the colorize box, the first thing to do is to drop the lightness slider, so that our colour becomes deeper and stronger -- a value of about -35 works well for this photo. Then grab the hue slider and move it around to find the exact colour you want. A value of '360' works well for me, but you can experiment. Finally, we want to increase the saturation to strengthen the red still further. Be careful not to go too far -- we want to keep some texture, otherwise it will look obviously fake. A value of about 60 works well for me on this photo.
And that's it! Hit OK, clear the selection, and you'll have the result I showed above. It takes a long time to write out (and to do the first time), but it's a fairly simple modification that you can do in under a minute once you're familiar with the tools in question. And as with anything in Photoshop, there's undoubtedly several more ways to achieve the same effect -- this is just the one that made sense to me.
Let me know if you have any questions or get stuck!
Nice work tho - @abirkill