Another Grey Scale Problem

[sjmac]

Hello,

I've been importing some old photos in to the Elements organiser, and I found this photo. I remember taking it because I liked the ripples in the land and the shadow of the tree across the field in the background. I think I really needed to get closer, but that was 3 years ago now, so ...

The picture is pretty dull and badly framed, but I thought I'd see what I could do having read some of HPPE3. The first step is to decide on the contrast and key of the picture apparently Low contrast, low key?

Like some others here though, I'm a bit confused by the Channel Mix Grey tool. Maybe I can get some help with that, and also if anyone has any ideas about making the picture look any better, that would be great too!

I thought I'd see what this looked like in B&W, which would let me get away with some colour filtering to get rid of some of the haze. I guess that the haze is mainly coming from scattered light, which is mainly blue, so I wanted to remove the blue channel. I tried to use the channel mix, but couldn't get a feel for how to use it. What I did instead was to use "Split RGB", delete the blue channel, make Red and Green visible, and lower the opacity of the top one to 50%. That leaves me with a 50% mix of red and green I think. I played with the mix a little, but that seemed about best.

Then I used the Hidden Power curves effect to reduce the overall image contrast a little, but to increase the contrast in the sky and middle a little (a gentle f-curve).

I did a couple of gentle unsharp masks with a small radius, then my favourite technique from HPPE -- the contrast was a bit weak still, so I tried an unsharp mask filter using a really big radius (30 pixels on the original).

The B&W looked a bit cool -- it was a spring evening -- so I've warmed it up by following the "Antique Print" in the Elements How To help page.

So
1/ How could I have removed the blue using the Channel Mix tool?
2/ Does anyone think I can get much more from the photo? (I tried turning the saturation up to 80% on the colour version -- is that nice or not? )

Thanks for any hints!

Steven

I've put the original image on http://tenuouslink.net/rtp/

[Richard_Lynch]

I can't seem to get that original. Can you check the link or provide another?

Have you tried using the suggested approach to image correction that is spelled out in the book? From your description of direction, it seems you are going at this without a real procedure -- which is not recommended!

Let me know.

[Panpan]

On a hunch, I replaced tenous with tenuous in the link name. It worked.

Pierre

[sjmac]

Yes, http://tenuouslink.net/rtp/DSCN9921.jpg for that image.

Sorry for the confusion; well spotted Pierre!

[Richard_Lynch]

I've taken a look at what I believe is the original. Regretfully there isn't a lot more detail that i can see you pulling out of that image. I think my suggestion would instead be to see what you can learn from the photo (though I also think your idea of toning the photo probably leads to a best-case result).

You see, an image that is without more prominent coloring will not lend itself well to getting varied results from mixing channels. depending on how you crop this image, it is possibly even a high-contrast image. I could even see doing some wilder editing that makes it more of an artistic piece (see attached -- forgive me, i did it very quickly). However, the color depth is not significant.

in the future, you might want to use a faster lense in order to capture more color detail. In a landscape where all is rather green, it will be hard to pull off the kind of change I think you are looking for here, without significant manual adjustment.

does that help?

[sjmac]

Thanks for your alternate view of the pic; it's an interesting landscape, but the camera struggled to capture the parts that interested me. I have a new camera now, so if I ever go back at the same time of day I can have another go!

Really I'm looking for some advice about the channel mixer tool though. How did you desaturate the picture? Did you use your mixer power tool? If you did, what settings did you use?