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I've been teaching myself how to do some of the basics on PS6. Here's the result of my first attempt to improve an image. Original included. C&C welcome.

Original


PP Version

Andrew, I'm still fairly new to PP myself, but looks like you are off to a strong start. The one obvious issue I see is a general lack of sharpness in the second shot, if you compare the writing from the first to the second it isn't nearly as clear.

Other then that, good job cloning out the wire, and bring the sea and sky to life.

I'm wondering if the lack of sharpness is due to resizing to the web, and maybe forgetting to sharpen after the resize ?

Thanks for your comments Craig. Yep, you're spot on. I haven't applied any sharpening to the photo whatsoever. Like I said, I'm new to all of this...

Should I apply sharpening after re-sizing as a general rule?

As a general rule, whenever you resize something it will become softer. Suddenly where you had a square of 16 pixels to show something you now only have 8 or 4, as a result the resized version is less accurate. A little sharpening canhelp redefined edges and give the impression of a sharper more infocus image. (I suck at explaining it, but give it a go and see the difference).

A common mistake is to oversharpen, this can result is some strange and unwanted affects such as 'halos' around objects.

Yep, the PP image needs sharpening. Otherwise it looks good to me.

I think the slight crop works OK too.

Looks good to me Andrew. Looks a little like you used a polarizing filter for the second image. I guess the trick with any of these edits is not to overdo it, especially in terms of saturation, but this looks realistic. I like how the colour of the water has improved.

_______________________
Cheers,
Paul.

ABG wrote:Here's the result of my first attempt to improve an image.

"Improve" is a very subjective term, it really depends what you want to convey with the image. To me, the first one conveys a cold-ish, almost wintry atmosphere, which works. The saturation boost in the second one gives it a spring/summer look, but I feel you may have gone a little too far with it: to me, it looks like it's been PPd with saturation++ and hence has a slightly fake feel to it, almost 'kiddies book' type colours. As I said though, all this is very subjective, and if it works for you it's good! Some USM wouldn't go astray too, as people have suggested.

Thanks for all your comments guys. Thanks for your honesty too Trent. You're spot on about improvement being a subjective term. Unlike you, I like what the saturation has done for the sky, but unlike Paul I reckon it's taken the water a notch or two too far. There's probably some way I can work around that and have the sky I want and de-saturate the water a touch, but I'm too much of a novice to know how to achieve it. I'd also be willing to bet there's others here who love the water the way it is, but don't like what I've done for the sky.

With regards to USM, do you guys have some baseline settings that you use in most cases, or are you tweaking each image with totally different settings?

ABG wrote:There's probably some way I can work around that and have the sky I want and de-saturate the water a touch, but I'm too much of a novice to know how to achieve it.

A real quick way is to use the Sponge tool (I assume it's in PS6??!!) You should find it nestled in with the Dodge Tool and the Burn Tool (about halfway down on the right-hand side of the main Tools palette. Grab this tool, make sure the settings at the top read "Desaturate" and away you go, painting ove the area you want ot suck the colour from. You can adjust the strength accordingly. Start soft and build it up until you get the desired result.

ABG wrote:With regards to USM, do you guys have some baseline settings that you use in most cases, or are you tweaking each image with totally different settings?

There are certainly some settings that work better than others for various image types but it's really a case of experimentation. USM is one of Photoshop's great mysteries for most people and, as such, has plenty of material in the way of advice and tutorials on the web. Do a search here as well and you'll find some settings to play around with. I've got some set as actions but I can't access them until I get home tonight.

Perhaps someone can toss you some ideas between now and then..

There are always many ways to achieve the same result in Photoshop. You could select the area you want to edit and only that area will be affected by any changes you make. Working with layers & masks is the best way (I find) to work on different parts of an image without affecting others. It's all really straight forward when you know what you are doing.

As Manta suggested a search of the internet for tutorials is a good place to start. Here is one for you http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials.htm

With USM a good general approach for high res images is to set the amount to 175%, radius to 2 , threshold to 0. Most images require an amount setting in the range of 150% to 200%. Then you just play around with the sliders adjusting the amount up or down and the radius mostly down. It is a good idea to do this on a separate duplicate layer which you can then reduce in opacity to fine tune the result.

I'm sure lots of people have their own methods and settings, best thing to do is play around and read as much as possible.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul.

If this is your first go, you've done really well...

You've brought the scene alive with the general added sat etc. but the second does look softer,

The only things that to me might help with this one is:
To me the only thing that needs less sat is the green grass in the foreground... Go into the Sat layer and select the greens in the drop down list and decrease a smidge of sat, worth a try. I probably would have pushed the contrast a smidge more too...

When sharpening your high res image (you can do this for any affect/adjustment and gives you much more control) select the area you want the effect to apply to (and feather the selection a smidge), that way when sharpening, you don't increase noise in sky for example... When re-sharpening after re-sizing for web display, you can apply a soft/gentle final sharpen at lower percentage/strength to give it a bit of snap...

Also, work with adjustment layers where-ever possible rather than duplicating layers, as duplicating layers will blow out your file size, adjustment layers don't blow the file size out as much, smaller files...

There's heaps of things you can do in PP to even get more life out of things like the sky using gradients etc, check out some good photoshop links:

Here's just a few but there's heaps out there...:
http://porg.4t.com/Recent.html
http://ronbigelow.com/articles/articles.htm
http://www.thelightsright.com/Digital-Darkroom.htm
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/

There's heaps out there...

Paul, Simon and Andrew, thanks for the encouragement and for pointing me in the right direction. Andrew, you lost me from the point after you said open photoshop Seriously though, I didn't apply the changes to layers - I applied them to the original image. In future, however, I'll try adjustment layers. It seems I have a bit of light reading to catch up on....

andrew
that is bloody good !!

cheers rob