Hello everybody,

really need your advice on how i can increase the brighness of the buildings here without "over-blowing" the fireworks? As you can see, the buildings really looks underexposed here.

Can someone teach me a way?

I'm using PS 6, so hopefully your advices would be something i can work on.

Thanks alot.

You can do a luminocity selection option apple ~ (on a mac)
Invert the selection and make a new layer out of it. This will have only the dark parts of your photograph. now you can play around with levels or curves.

For what it's worth though, I think the photograph looks great as is. I don't know that lightening the buildings would make it better.

PS. If you can get a hold of Photoshop CS you can used the shadow/highlight adjustment that will take care of problem pretty effectively.

ah_seng, great shot!

i just changed the levels of whole pic, to give the sky black color, then i used lasso to select buildings (with a little bit of wky), again changed levels and brightness/contrast, deselected and replaced color - that bit of now reddish sky - with black. last thing: some play with clone stamp and smudge to complete the effect :)

Hi goose443,

thanks for your advice and help here. Really appreciate that. :classic:

Did you do that using the shadow/highlight adjustment in Photoshop CS?

Thanks thana. :pleased:

I can follow your methods, but may i know what is wky and how do you do that "replaced color" with black?

Sorry to bother you again...

I did a quick mask selection of the fireworks and put them on a new layer so they were safe. Then I used the Adjustment/Shadow/Highlight to lift the lights in the buildings. Next I used the burn tool to darken the sky. Then sharpend the image and finally turned the fireworks image back on.

ah_seng,

heheh, wky = sky ;) pardon...

in PS is function 'replace color', i just chose color on pic and minimized lightness. that'll be all :)

masked the building with show all. the rest in hide all. converted show all to selection. ran a contrast/lighten and then a high pass sharpen on the selection.

done.

the 2nd one was just for fun.

Craig

Hi goose443,

thanks for your advice and help here. Really appreciate that. :classic:

Did you do that using the shadow/highlight adjustment in Photoshop CS?


No, the corrrection was done using the first method I described. Sorry for the confusion.

I added a screen mode layer. Then I added TLR diffuse glow 5 from G. Mitchell's action set. I finished by setting the black point and sharpening.

Another way to achieve the diffuse glow effect is to add a radius-11 gaussian blur and set its opacity to 30% and its mode to vivid light.

Pierre

Thanks deadants, thana, Kraellin, goose443 & Panpan for all your help and advices. You guys are truly amazing and helpful! :wavey:

you're welcome :)

Craig