Working a picture

[pecunium]

People, every so often, wonder how I get pictures.

I use a camera.

All kidding aside that's the meat of it. Darkroom technique can salvage a borderline image, but it can't recue a muddy piece of crap.

So, I'll go through the major steps in editing, and show them. It's kind of like a process post on a blog about writing.

First, one needs a picture. So the roll/folder has to be gone through. From that an image has to be selected. Unlesss I'm going to copy an entire sequence, you'll just have to trust me that the thing to do is find one you like.




So, we have a picture. It has action, a bit of drama and a hint of story, but it's not perfect. The most grievous flaw is the queen being distracted. So we have to crop it, which will have the pleasant side effect of making the swords' motion more evident.

In addition to Her Majesty, the top and bottom have some really gross zonal differences. The stage, and sky are more than six stops from the details on the costumes. So we'll crop those too.



[From here the images are all the same size, if you want to see them in more detail you can open them up full-size (750 pixels wide) and stack them]

It's not a perfect crop, to keep the feet of the swordsman on the left, I had to retain the flowers. I could cut the flowers out, but then there'd be no visual floor for him to stand on. However, cropping that tight; top and bottom, intensifies the linear aspects of the piece, which makes it seem more alive. By giving about three times the space above as I have on the bottom the sense of closeness is increased, which makes the fact of the fencers being inside each others' space more visceral.

On the upside, everone in the picture now seems to be paying attention to the action, and they take up a larger portion of the frame.

But it's soft, and the colors might be a little flat.

So I'll move the tones. I pushed the top 1 1/2 zones up, about 1/2 zone, and then the middle four were compressed/moved up about 1 zone. The rest covered about 1 1/2 zones, which I opened up by dragging them down an extra zone.

I also wanted to warm the image up some, because the reflected sky was giving a blue cast to everything (look at the sleeves of the shirt). To fix that I set the white point by telling the application the shirt of the left hand fencer = 5817K, where the original value was 5000K. That gave a more yellow cast to everything, which has the effect of making things seem brighter (the relations of the colors and the zones they fall in are, basically, unchanged. What's not the same is the highlight and reflections. In the first version there's no evidence of sun).



It's still not quite what I want. The edges are fuzzy, and the colors are flabby. So I'll sharpen them up, and work on the luminance/saturation.




I divided the red, and blue channels, to adjust the saturation/luminance of them separately, and I finished with a bit of noise reduction; I treated it to a "hard light" filter, increasing the overall contrast.

Voila, we have a picture. Total time, from start to finish, about five minutes.

That is, basically, the way it works; irrespective of medium. For color film, I trade money for time. I talk to my printer and tell him/her what I want the colors to look like, and how bright it ought to look as well as how contrasty. In B&W I spend both time, and money (which is what I do with digital, but I have up-front costs, which replace the ongoing costs of paper and chemicals).

Comments

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

Thanks!