flat and dull (reloaded)

[nabero]

Re-posting a thread that must have been just too weak to make it through the blackout

If you posted on this before with any edits, please feel free (please please) to repost them here :hail:

My issue was that I was taking these photos in a low-light situation and trying to lighten them in photoshop, but my results were quite dull. Any suggestions or examples of how to bring depth into them in PS is greatly appreciated :sillysmi:

Original:

My edit:

Oh and if you're curious of what you're looking at...The subject of this photo is that tall tree in the foreground--more specifically the board that is nailed to it waaaay up there. See it? Now do you see the river running belong the tree? That board was nailed there while sitting in a small boat and marks the level that the river reached during a flood a couple of years ago.

Cheers!

 

[LaFoto]

I gave it a try. But keep in mind that my version of PS is ancient, its licence ran out in 1999, it is the PS 6.0 version. Many of the newer functions are not there.

I often only work with levels, and with selecting things with a well-feathered lasso tool.

So when I first looked at the histogramme as shows when you open the levels in PS, I saw this:

Photo underexposed all the way, and quite much so.

Therefore I decided to pull up the highlights for the entire photo as much as I can:

As you can see, I went to 170, so the lever would reach the "mountain" from the right.

After that, I threw a lasso (feathered at 60px) round that part of the tree alone which "sticks out" - I was told there weren't enough pixels chosen but I ignored that message and went as far as I could in upping the highlights:

Then I selected the ground part with the same lasso again and saw in the histogramme for that area that even after upping the highlights from 255 to 170 for the entire photo, there still was hardly any light there:

So I went from 255 to 155 ...

... and decided that that is as far as I feel happy enough to go with this photo without making it "flat and dull". Problem is: it is way underexposed to begin with and pp programmes can only go THAT far with a technically-gone-all-wrong photo. Sorry.

My edit (end-result).

 

[bornwina]

Here is a version i came up with

I used the dodge,burn and sponge tools in photoshop

 

[NJMAN]

My original reply to your post went something like this:

What I did was create a duplicate layer in PS, applied a gaussian blur of 4 on the dup layer, and then applied a blend mode of Overlay. You might also want experimenting with blend modes of Multiply, Soft Light, or Hard Light. If you are doing this on the full size high res version of the photo, you may want to set the gaussian blur to something like 14 or 20 or higher depending on the effect you are looking for. Finally, I applied a slight burn on the edges at about 25% opacity.

This was all done on your brightened version, not your original underexposed version.

Hope this helps.

NJ

 

[PNA]

Here's my take on it......

 

[battlestation]

I took a stab at it

 

[laguano]

My try..

 

[nabero]

Oh wow....somehow I forgot about this post. Thanks to all of those who posted edits after I apparently fell off the face of the earth! They're all really interesting approaches and I need to get back into PS to see if I can get something working on it.

I'm about to run out the door here...but if anyone who posted edits wouldn't mind letting me know what they did to the image (cliffs notes or lengthy versions are fine I'm just having a hard time of where to start...

Cheers!