I drove by India Point Park at lunch for today's photo. This skateboarder was sitting on a bench enjoying the view along the river, so I asked him if he'd mind taking a couple of passes on his board for my photo. I wanted a shot like this with the marina and old railroad trestle in the background. We spent a bit of time talking about the changes in skateboarding in recent years, and he was lamenting the loss of many indoor and outdoor skateboard parks. Some, like the one in North Providence, closed to avoid repairs, while others have closed to avoid liability concerns. While skateboarding continues to increase in popularity, the areas open to the boarders are increasingly limited. Too many parks today have "no skateboarding" signs, and they are prohibited on all of the bike / walking paths in the state. Reversing those prohibitions in our public parks would certainly benefit a growing segment of the users of those parks.
Post processing today started with a neutral grayscale filter in Topaz B&W FX. I adjusted adaptive exposure, followed by color sensitivity sliders, regions, protect highlights, boost black, boost white, and contrast. I applied a dodge to his face to bring it out of deep shadow. A levels adjustment and a sepia photo filter were added in PSE.
Nice B&W. I've noticed the park signs as well. Some consider it a nuisance and a liability but that could be said for a lot things. There's no doubt that skateboarders get picked on a bit in terms of making things off limits.
@tigerdreamer Karen, picture the image's histogram with the dark end of the spectrum on the left, and the light end of the spectrum on the right. The Levels adjustment permits modification to the pure blacks, the pure whites, and the mid-tones without changing the shape of the overall histogram. I most frequently adjust the lights to ensure I get a pure white at the very far right of the histogram. I also adjust the mid-tones since that brings out the contrast in the shadows. In a color photo, those mid-tones will also help make the colors "pop".
Play around a bit in PSE with the Brightness/Contrast adjustment versus the Levels adjustment and notice what each does to the histogram. When you adjust brightness, you shift the entire histogram left or right. When you adjust contrast, you adjust the vertical height of the histogram up and down. When you adjust Levels, however, the shape and position of the histogram remain unchanged.
All three adjustments have their place, so you'll see me use all three of them periodically. My fine tuning, however, is always with Levels.
@kannafoot Thanks, I do use levels on most of my pics, but I use it first. I was wondering why you use it last? It seems like some of my other adjustments would need to be reset after levels.
For instance when I was adjusting the RGB sliders in my B&W tree shot yesterday, those would have changed again.
@tigerdreamer Ah! Sorry, I misunderstood the question. Virtually all of my processing is in three stages. I shoot RAW, so my first adjustments are in the Canon RAW dialog that PSE presents when the file is opened. That's where I'll apply a clarity adjustment (since the camera does no sharpening in a RAW photo), tweak the white balance and tones, tweak the overall exposure if necessary, add fill light to bring out the hidden detail in the RAW image, adjust brightness and contrast, and adjust the black tones. The whole point there is to get the histogram into the shape I want for maximum tonal range throughout the image. I'm trying to avoid having any clipped data on either side of the spectrum.
Phase 2 is in Topaz Adjust for a color image or Topaz B&W FX for a B&W image. The Topaz products give a wide range of sliders that control virtually every aspect of the image. This is where I'm doing my very broad editing and producing the image as I want it to appear. The problem, though, is that the Topaz products are not limited by the 8-BIT per channel restriction of a .JPG image. So the image in Topaz is vibrant, contains a very wide tonal range, and has astonishing details in the shadows. When you return that image to PSE, though, 50% of that data is lost. The default mode in PSE - and the only one that allows the use of layers - is 8-BIT per channel, not 16-BIT. (A JPG image is always an 8-BIT per channel image.)
The third phase of my processing, therefore, is to undo the damage done by that 16-BIT to 8-BIT conversion. That's why I do a slight levels adjustment in PSE - it's to restore some of that mid-tone contrast that was lost in the conversion. There's not much that can be done at either end of the spectrum, and I rarely have need to actually change the shape of the histogram. I'm applying a slide of the mid-tone, typically to either 0.98 or 0.96 to restore some of the "pop".
If it does dramatically change the color tones, I'll apply either a hue adjustment or a photo filter, but a 0.04 slide to the right rarely has that effect.
@tigerdreamer The change is significant. Canon now uses a 16-BIT per channel format for its RAW files. So in terms of pure data, an 8-BIT per channel JPG contains a maximum range of 16,777,216 unique 3-channel values. It actually works out to about 940,000 individual colors.
The RAW image, though, contains approximately 281,475,000,000,000 unique tonal ranges! By letting the camera do a JPG conversion, that is a LOT of image data that gets thrown away.
It's even worse when a b&w image is processed in-camera instead of after the fact. In that case, you're limited to a maximum tonal range of 256 shades of gray. Even in the in-camera JPG conversion, that's over 939,000 unique shades that were discarded before the image was ever downloaded to the PC!
I guess the moral of the story is to always extract from the camera the maximum amount of data possible for each image.
I just can't get the hang of asking strangers for shots. You are experienced at it by far. I love you black and white and your interesting street photography. Maybe now I have a real camera! I can feel more confident in asking strangers
Play around a bit in PSE with the Brightness/Contrast adjustment versus the Levels adjustment and notice what each does to the histogram. When you adjust brightness, you shift the entire histogram left or right. When you adjust contrast, you adjust the vertical height of the histogram up and down. When you adjust Levels, however, the shape and position of the histogram remain unchanged.
All three adjustments have their place, so you'll see me use all three of them periodically. My fine tuning, however, is always with Levels.
For instance when I was adjusting the RGB sliders in my B&W tree shot yesterday, those would have changed again.
Phase 2 is in Topaz Adjust for a color image or Topaz B&W FX for a B&W image. The Topaz products give a wide range of sliders that control virtually every aspect of the image. This is where I'm doing my very broad editing and producing the image as I want it to appear. The problem, though, is that the Topaz products are not limited by the 8-BIT per channel restriction of a .JPG image. So the image in Topaz is vibrant, contains a very wide tonal range, and has astonishing details in the shadows. When you return that image to PSE, though, 50% of that data is lost. The default mode in PSE - and the only one that allows the use of layers - is 8-BIT per channel, not 16-BIT. (A JPG image is always an 8-BIT per channel image.)
The third phase of my processing, therefore, is to undo the damage done by that 16-BIT to 8-BIT conversion. That's why I do a slight levels adjustment in PSE - it's to restore some of that mid-tone contrast that was lost in the conversion. There's not much that can be done at either end of the spectrum, and I rarely have need to actually change the shape of the histogram. I'm applying a slide of the mid-tone, typically to either 0.98 or 0.96 to restore some of the "pop".
If it does dramatically change the color tones, I'll apply either a hue adjustment or a photo filter, but a 0.04 slide to the right rarely has that effect.
The RAW image, though, contains approximately 281,475,000,000,000 unique tonal ranges! By letting the camera do a JPG conversion, that is a LOT of image data that gets thrown away.
It's even worse when a b&w image is processed in-camera instead of after the fact. In that case, you're limited to a maximum tonal range of 256 shades of gray. Even in the in-camera JPG conversion, that's over 939,000 unique shades that were discarded before the image was ever downloaded to the PC!
I guess the moral of the story is to always extract from the camera the maximum amount of data possible for each image.