Few from yesterday

bassiusmaximous · Aug 24, 2011

Hey all just took a few pics of a friends car yesterday let me know what you guys think!

bigtwinky · Aug 24, 2011

Nice car!

oldmacman · Aug 24, 2011

They seem to have a muted mid tone quality. Perhaps they were under exposed and you made some pp adjustments? You can see the haloing in the 5th, 7th and 8th pick around the trees. I've had this happen when I try to bring back a sky that was a tad blown. If you were only relying on natural light, it probably wasn't the best TOD to shoot. They all seem a tad soft as well, although I tend to over sharpen sometimes. For a car, however, I like nice crisp lines to enhance the idea of precision machining.

bassiusmaximous · Aug 24, 2011

the 5th one I had to do some editing to it... there were major sun spots in it probably the reasoning... what might I be able to do to fix my results?

oldmacman · Aug 25, 2011

bassiusmaximous said:
the 5th one I had to do some editing to it... there were major sun spots in it probably the reasoning... what might I be able to do to fix my results?

Do you use Photoshop? Here is the revised car. I left your original in the message because sometimes the changes are subtle and a side-by-side helps to see the difference:

What was done:
- first, this is a quick edit, so you can see that I was not careful with my masking near the edges, but this gives you an idea of what can be done
- four blend layers
- first is a duplicate of the original image then made into a screened layer to bring out details in the car shadows (bumper area) and then masked to remove the screen on the trees
- second is a "darker colour" blend. This is a blank layer and then I use a low opacity cloning from nearby blue sky and paint over the halos in the trees. It's not perfect, but greatly reduced. Using the "darker colour" blend allows you to be imprecise with you painting and play right up to the edges of the branches because only the darkest colour form the two layers will be shown.
- third is a sharpening layer. Duplicate the original image and change blend mode to Linear Light. Apply a Filter>Other>High Pass (menu items) and then drag the slider until the sharpness of the car looks good. Too much and the car will get an ugly, crisp halo.
- mask that third layer and remove the sharpening from the background. This helps to give the car background separation
- These layers bring out the noise in the shadow area so add your fourth layer and apply noise reduction. I have Topaz Labs plugin. When you are happy with the shadow area, hide this layer by pressing the alt key and then clicking on the mask icon in the layer inspector. Then bring back the noise reduction in the shadow areas of the car by painting white where you want to apply the noise reduction.

Hope this helps.