Spicing the Middle

I could hear Rosco "licking the film" so to speak.  Things must have been going well, as there were few snorts and lots of light tail-tapping.  I figured i'd check up on him.

"So...Roski how's it going?"

<pant><pant>

"What you got there?"

Rosco leaned back so i could see.

Oh... I said, from the Land of the Pungent Stinkies, back in 03.  I remember when you took that, Rosco. 

<wag><wag>

"That was a late afternoon walk with your brother in the barrancas down from the house up on the ridge."

I looked at the picture.

"So, Roski, what are you trying to do here?"

Rosco explained that he was working on a theme... something to do with paths and trails and, at the same time, skies.  He wanted to get his sky technique down.

"Yes, i remember," i said, "that was a radiant sunset.  We had lots of pungent sunsets in Oaxaca."  

Rosco looked a little sad.

"Oh Roski, i'm sorry; i should have gotten you a better camera.  My mind was on other things and i had no idea you'd get so wrapped up with film strips."

<stare>

"But," i added hopefully, "with these new toys we can do wonders patching things up; don't you think?"

I decided not to dampen his enthusiasm by making  some pretentious remark about the difference between a "presentable" foto and a really "good" one. Instead, i just returned to the subject of what he was trying to accomplish.

Rosco explained that he was trying to "liven  up" the earth half of the foto without blowing out the sky, like what happened with the Silo foto.

"Ah, yes," i sighed, "the Silo.... that's going to take  some rethinking..."

The Silo was a foto where Rosco's adjustments to the darker foreground ended up creating a big splotch of white in what had been a very bright and shiny spot where the light had broken through grey clouds. 

"Yes," Rosco said, "and i don't want that to happen again."

"Did it?"

"Yes.  When i clicked on auto-exposure it did just that," Rosco said in a disapproving voice.  "You will notice," he said, nudging the screen with his nose, that the very centre of the bright spot is not entirely white.  It has  a very pale bluish-white spot."

I saw what he was talking about.

"But when i hit 'auto' it got blown out, even if the rest of the sky and the foto looked ok."

"You mean you lost that barely visible pale blue ellipse in the bright spot?"

"Lips?"

"Squished circle."

"Oh...ok.  Yes. It came out another phoochy white blotch," Rosco said with a snorting.

"Well... but i see the blue 'lips is still there; how did you fix it?"

Rosco said, he really didn't know exactly quite what he did, although he kept some notes where he keeps them in the file caption data.  What he tried to do was to spice out the colours of the trees and the earth without affecting any part of the sky.

"Well it seems to me," I said, "that you pretty much succeeded.  You did increase the the contrast and saturation  of the mid- and even dark- tones."  

I looked at Rosco's notes and saw that he left temp/tint alone but increased Clarity and Vibrance 40 and 26 percent respectively while decreasing darks and shadows by 6 and 11 percent.  Then he increased saturation by 17 percent.

"You didn't try brightness?" I asked.

"Yes, but both brightness and contrasted affected the whole picture. I wasn't going to do any adjustment that affected the sky.  Not one teensy bit.  Not."

"Okay.  Did you do anything else?"  

Rosco said that the only other thing he did was up the sharpness by a fair amount because the camera i gave him was such a piece of plastic crap.

<hard look>

In a chastened tone of voice, i told him the his efforts made the best of the...uh... situation.

"So that was it?"

"No.  I then went into the old programme, because thats where i reduce it and put my final (p) pawmark on it."

Rosco said that even though he would use Lightroom as a "first chew,"  he would continue to finish up in Photoshop, not only because he could put his pawprint on it but it gave him a chance to see if Photoshop could add anything to the picture.

"And did it?" I asked.

"Yes," Rosco. "I checked auto-levels, auto-contrast, auto-colour.  I forget what the contrast and colour did but auto levels added just like a screen of sparkliness."

"Oh," i said, "you mean luminescence."

"Yes, sparkly."

I asked him if he had saved a comparison. He answered that he had.  I could see the very subtle difference.

Rosco wanted to know how that sparkly sheen worked.

I told him that i was not quite sure, but that from what i had been able to find out, Photoshop can "stretch out" the color values of a picture.

"Stretch?" 

I explained that Photoshop takes the darkest part and makes it absolutely dark; and then the lightest part and makes it absolutely light. So if your highest white was "98" Photoshop made it 100; and if your darkest black was 2, it was made 0.  Everything from the middle up and pulled up a notch and everything from the middle down got pulled down a notch.

"But," Rosco protested, "why didn't this blotch out the white spot in the sky?"

"I donno, Roski," maybe it was just such a small bit, it was more precise than what your paw could manage."

<SNORT>

"Well," i said, "but for now the important thing is that it worked.  Did you get the result you wanted?"

Rosco said he had.  He had brought some colour to the earth, and made the puddle in the road sparkle and had not blown out the sky.

"Well good,"  I said, "we'll post it tonight after chow"

.

Valle de México, por José María Velasco (1849)