Urban Cowboy Self Portrait - C&C welcome.

[unpopular]

Here's a super quick curves adjustment. Be sure to click on the preview below for proper color management version:



The curve is (on a 0-100 scale, in : out):
14.6 : 7.1
39.5 : 32.8
69.6 : 62.8

 

[jwbryson1]

Here's a super quick curves adjustment. Be sure to click on the preview below for proper color management version:

View attachment 22323

The curve is (on a 0-100 scale, in : out):
14.6 : 7.1
39.5 : 32.8
69.6 : 62.8

This edit looks really good! I just bought CS6 and installed it this past weekend. Needless to say, as a Photoshop NewB I am completely oblivious to what the curves adjustment does to the image. Can you explain what you did in terms of Lightroom? I am more familiar with that software.

Nice edit!

For the record, I put the hat on just for fun. I'm not that much of a hick. :mrgreen:

 

[unpopular]

I am not sure about lightroom, but all curves adjustments work essentially the same. It is worth pointing out that this was done in Photoline, so the interpolation might be different, but not significantly - at least not in the mode I had it in.

At any rate, what Curves does is it takes a value, say a shadow region of 15%, translates that value to a different value, say 5%, and interpolates all other values according to that translation. So in this case, shadows are more greatly affected by the translation than hilights. Each point on the curve acts as a anchor or absolute reference, so if you made a curve of:

15 : 5
50 : 50
75 : 90

the shadows would be darker, the mids would be roughly the same while the hilights become lighter. Note that mid tones are anchored to where they started, the input is the same as the output.

If the numbers are what is confusing you, this is just a quick way of describing a curve without uploading the screen shot. You should be able to manually enter the input/output in a field within the Curves dialog, and theoretically get the same same results I did, provided that the interpolation is similar. You could do this when I was using Photoshop anyway. IIRC, what you do is place a curve anchor and then click on the input/output fields.