[Paint The Moon Luminosity Photoshop Actions Free Download
Ainoha Sistek
I have several disappointing photos which I'd like to try fixing, but cannot find any practical references for how to go about that. Specifically, do I need to adjust levels, brightness/contrast, exposure, shadows/highlights, gradients, etc.? I don't want to know how to use a photo editor's tools (there are plenty of tutorials), but how to apply the tools to my needs.
I tried uploading a single sample, but I can't see it in the preview. I hope it gets attached; otherwise I'll try with a follow-up post. The lighting on the desk in the center is just right, but I'd like a little brighter yard through the blinds on the left, and if possible, I want to bring out a little more of the china cabinet on the right.
If you shot JPEG, that's the start of the issue! Ideally, you want to stick with the raw data. The JPEG engine that processes the raw massively clips and compresses highlights. We often don't when editing the raw. This compression can clump midtones as much as 1 stop while compressing shadow details! People incorrectly state that raw has more highlight data but the fact is, the DR captured is an attribute of the capture system; it's all there in the raw but maybe not in a camera proceed JPEG.
A raw capture that's 10 or 11 stops of dynamic range can be compressed to 7 stops from this JPEG processing which is a significant amount of data and tonal loss! So when we hear people state that a raw has more DR than a JPEG, it's due to the poor rendering or handling of the data to create that JPEG. The rendering of this data and the reduction of dynamic range is from the JPEG engine that isn't handling the DR data that does exists as well as we can from the raw! Another reason to capture and render the raw data, assuming you care about how the image is rendered!
There is also something called scope, which has views of intensity waveform, RGB waveform, RGB parade, power spectral density and vectorscope. I would guess that some of these are specific to this software, but I can provide those views as well if they would tell you something they don't tell me.
Affinity Photo's Histogram isn't a raw Histogram. Like so many (Adobe's too), it represents the rendered image in a color space. That isn't what RD is doing. As such, it is one of the very, very rare tools that shows us the actual effect of exposure on the raw data. RD shows us the actual raw data in differing ways, such as:
There are a number of ways of lightening or darkening areas of an image. These are the methods I use, others may disagree or have different approaches they are comfortable with. I don't use Lightroom, these are how I use Photoshop CS5, I think Affinity has the same tools, perhaps under different names.
1) Use the RAW processor to create a lighter version of the picture. Put the original and lighter versions on different layers. Use a layer mask or the erase tool to make the lighter version show through where required.
2) Select the area to be lightened and feather the edge. Adjust the selected area using shadow / highlight, levels or curves. It's probably best to use shadow / highlight as it's a relatively gentle adjustment, using levels or curves can cause obvious edges.
3) Make a new overlay layer filled with 50% grey, and paint over with white to lighten, black to darken. This is how I do darkroom style dodging and burning, using a large, fuzzy brush at low opacity. It may not be the best way to adjust sharply defined areas.
So in your example, my preference would be to add 2 curves adjustment layers, each with a mask. In one layer, I would drag the curve downwards slightly and call it 'darken' and in the other, I would drag the curve upwards and call it 'brighten'. By default, masks are set to all-white so that they apply to the whole photo. If you select the mask and then select "layer", then "invert" then the mask turns black. A keyboard shortcut is CNTRL + "i". Using the paintbrush tool with the color white, you can then 'paint on" the mask to select the areas of a photo that you want the curve (darken/brighten) to apply. You can further adjust either the curve or (more usually) the opacity of the adjustment layer to the level you want the adjustment to apply.
Often, applying adjustments to selected areas by "painting in" white areas on a black mask works fine. But sometimes more precise selections are needed for areas (such as windows, etc.) that have edges. My go-to selection tool for this is the "polygonal lasso". Richt-click on the lasso tool and the polygonal lasso option is shown at the top. This option allows you select areas bounded by edges by clicking on points (for example corners).
I googled a couple of AffinityPhoto topics just to make sure that they were available. Generally, I found the videos at affinity.serif.com to be the best ones: short ca. 5 minutes, clear and to-the-point.
I find the "Quick Selection Tool" absolutely invaluable for this task. It's the small paintbush just below the polygonal lasso in the toolbar (CS5). As long as there are reasonably well defined boundaries, moving the tool's circle over the area to be selected almost magically (at least to me) selects the area up to the edges. If it overshoots, just use the same tool while holding down "Alt" to adjust the edge.
That's a bit like saying :"I don't want to learn how to fly a plane, I just want to fly it from A to B." If you want to adjust tonality, you need to learn the tools that do that. The suggestions that John and Mike offered are just a few of the many ways you can use those tools to change tonality. However, there is no recipe. You need to diagnose what specific changes you want to make and then decide which of the many tools will work for you.
As Dog pointed out, we can't tell from the JPEG whether your raw file has detail in the shadows. If not, then there is no way to retrieve them, and you would have to retake the image using bracking and HDR or exposure blending. if there is detail in the shadows, there are several tools you could use. Personally, I'd probably use luminosity masks, which you can now emulate pretty easily in Lightroom. Alternatively, you could use selection tools, as in Photoshop or many other programs.
I'm unable to attach the CSV file from RawDigger because it's not an image. Is there a screenshot I can grab for you? RawDigger has a sale that only runs for another few hours, so if the data I provided is useful to you or anyone else, please let me know so I can purchase it at the discounted price. I'll be happy to learn it in depth, but not if it only provides limited value.
I have experimented with Affinity's quick selection tool (and earlier the flood selection tool in Paint_Dot_Net) in other images to isolate certain areas and play with all of the various settings, so I know how to use them and what they do. However, after placing selections on new layers and making adjustments, they don't seem to blend in well with the original image. They result in a photo that shouts "...and I made this part lighter".
I agree that Affinity's video tutorials are very well done; brief and clear. But they don't help me with my original post. Since I am an amateur trying to get up to speed on both the original image and post-processing, there are still things I don't know. In this thread's example, which tools should I use to fix certain problems. Going back to the airplane analogy, now that I can get the plane up in the air and land it again, and I can turn and change altitude, what do I do in case of bad weather; fly above it, fly around it, or increase speed to plow through and get out more quickly?
The JPEG i posted was to save space, but if there is a 1GB limit, I could upload the RAW file, which is 28MB. (I'm used to producing JPEG's that are 5-8 MB). You can't see the china cabinet on the right because it is underexposed, but I can see it if I bump exposure by 2 full stops. (That's not the effect I want for the overall picture, I'm just saying it's possible.)
What I'd suggest is you examine a much easier feedback loop first; the Display overlay for under and overexposure which will show you what is what on your own image, because you the image creator may decide some areas are fine to block up (especially in shadows). Look at my screen capture above, you'll see that option to click on one or both checkboxes and to the right, the over and under stats of the entire image. Between the stats and the overlay, you can get a quick look at the exposure results on that specific raw.
So the info in RD shows you didn't over-expose any pixels and you did under-exposed some so that indicates you could have increased the exposure. The trick is providing enough exposure so you do not clip highlights you wish not to clip and this is where RD and testing come into play.
Often there are a variethy of options. For example, one of the most basic techniques to change tonality in parts of an image is dodging and burning. There are a variet of ways to do that. I use a method that I think maximizes control, but I'd be willing to bet that some people here who have very good postprocessing skills use a different approach.
Another example: in the Adobe world, there are at least three approaches for basic global tonality adjustments: the sliders in Lightroom, the curve tool in both Lightroom and Photoshop, and the levels tool in Photoshop. All of them do the same thing: they change the brightness of the image. However, they do it in different ways, and the expert editors I know often choose to use different ones. The key is learning how each of them affects luminosity and then choosing the one(s) that enable you to make the changes you want. I personally don't fine the LR sliders all that useful in many cases and prefer the control offered by levels and curves, but I know people who feel exactly the opposite. Different strokes.
Not entirely suprising if you have selections with hard edges. You could feather your selections to make the borders fade a bit gradually, you could use a brush and vary the hardness, or you could use luminosity masks, which are usually self-feathering. All of these take time to learn, and which one is best depends on both taste and the particular image. In this case, you have an image with very hard edges, so it's going to be difficult to make adjustments that don't have fine edges. This may limit how powerful an adjustment you can make before things begin to look artificial.
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