Morning coffee

[The amateur]

"Morning Coffee" is a simple photo without pretensions on a sunny morning, as often happens around here.
Sometimes, there's a northern breeze that requires us to bundle up a bit, but the sun makes up for it somewhat.

[Geoff F]

A difficult light angle but the result looks good to me.

[The amateur]

Thank you very much for your response, Geoff !
This photograph doesn't really have anything special, it's simple and easy to achieve.

My tendency for many years—perhaps since I adopted digital—has been to always or most of the time, prioritise aperture.

This allows me to play with the depth of field on capture but here, maybe the issue was the light coming from above and behind the person.

An adjustment in LR more or less solves the issue of having relatively little light on the face.
However, if you notice, the arm holding the cup is slightly pixelated all around and the hair would need some more time to avoid looking burnt... oh well...

One more detail: I love this lens !

Cheers !

[The amateur]

Geoff, still about portraits !

Recently, my wife and I went back to India, and I met a guard in Jaipur that I was sure I had met before and even taken a photo of.
I went searching and found it because I organize my photos by keywords in LR.
It was taken in October 2009!
Now, instead of taking a decent photo of the man, I was using a wide-angle lens and couldn't get a decent picture of the person, who unfortunately ended up blurry. Shame on me !
Truly regrettable. Why did this happen? Because people were behind me in a long line... excuses, excuses...

It's a shame. Now, I retrieved the 2009 photograph, processed it, and I'll send it by email. I'm sure he'll be very happy to see how he looked back then.

Cheers

[DanK]

I like the first image, but the very bright pavement and table are quite distracting.

They are bright enough that simply burning those areas won't work well; if you darken them enough, they will start turning grey. Here's a VERY rough example of an alternative.

I did a bit with a luminosity mask, but the main thing I did was to use a multiply blend mode. Here are the steps:

1. Duplicate the layer and add a mask to the duplicate
2. Set the blend mode to multiply and invert the mask
3. Then, with the mask selected and the foreground color set to white, paint over the areas you want darkened with a soft brush.
4. If that isn't enough (it wasn't in this case), duplicate the top layer again.
5. If that effect is too strong (it was in this case), reduce the opacity of the top layer.

I did only a quick and dirty job, but you can see that this darkens those areas without adding gray.

[The amateur]

Dan, thank you for your work, even if it was brief, quick, and less accurate.

It's interesting how sometimes we don't notice small flaws and issues in an image and only later, either by someone from outside or by ourselves, do we become aware of them.

That happened here because I could have immediately noticed this problem but Dan managed to identify it promptly, something I completely agree with.
Fixing excessive brightness in certain areas can be challenging, especially for me, with limited knowledge in this aspect.

So, how do I usually deal with it, or at least try to? I typically go to the Luminosity Range in LR and do my best to correct the defects in the original photograph. Sometimes I succeed, other times very little.
Either way, during the capture, I always try to correctly expose the highlights.

Before we move on to the practical example of what you suggested in your post that I followed, let me start by showing the original photograph.

Terrible, isn't it? Or maybe not, because it's actually exposed for the highlights. The red dots refer to too much light in the histogram. The shadows can be recovered.

I framed it initially and did some minimal editing in LR. Then I exported it to Photoshop to fix some details. Here, I was already losing detail in the hair !

After a Generative Fill of the table and applying your suggestion as well as I could I got a similar result.

Then, I used another method I just "created", which was to turn the photograph into a Smart Object in Photoshop CC and apply the Camera Raw Filter only to the area of the table previously selected using a mask.

The problem stems much further back it originates from Lightroom, and why do I say so ?
Because the person's arm becomes completely pixelated, hence the initial selection of the person was poorly done.

This image doesn't deserve much more than what has been done and discussed so far. More interesting photographs worth greater efforts !
I hope I haven't been too boring with this detailed and lengthy explanation.
Thank you.

Cheers !
NOTE - Can you see the pixelation or whatever that is, at the bottom left on this superb lens ?
Another detail to fix !

[The amateur]

Good morning Dan !
After trying once with your way of solving the highlights issue without any apparently good results, I insisted on the matter again.
Just as I thought before, the problem always arises in selecting the objects we want to work on.

The method you described with the painting brush on the mask is definitely good, but a more precise selection is crucial to achieve remarkable success in the image.

Anyway, Dan, thank you very much for your kind proposal and the effort you put into addressing this matter.

I still prefer the automatic selections and I am now very accustomed to object selection in LR.
This seems particularly interesting and effective to me; evidently, it also has its problems, but it's a quick way to move forward.
On the other hand, with the product's evolution, it's natural for the selection process to become increasingly refined, leading to the creation of more and more interesting works.

I would also like to add that there's the possibility of jumping to Photoshop and making small corrections and adjustments.

As a final note, I must add that most likely, the photograph I took had some less accurate capture adjustments, obviously making its subsequent treatment more difficult.

Cheers!

[DanK]

Antonio,

The important part of the method I described isn't using a brush. It can be used with selections as well. The critical thing is using the multiply blend mode, which is not available in Lightroom.

When an area in a photograph is very light and has to be darkened a lot, any of the standard burning approaches in either Lightroom or Photoshop will create an unnatural gray cast. The multiply blend mode doesn't do that.

The multiply blend mode literally multiplies the values of a pixel in one layer by the values of the same pixel in the layer below. In the method I describe, both layers are the same, so it is simply squaring the values of each pixel. Therefore, it darkens using exactly the same mix of RGB and does not create the gray color cast.

Because it is simply squaring the values, it darkens already dark areas more than light areas. So in an image like yours, you have to be careful that the blend only happens in light areas, using a brush or a selection.

However, this feature can also be useful. It can re-create contrast in areas that are washed out and lack contrast. First, look at this image, in particular, the faces:



this photo, which is of my maternal great grandparents, was taken in Lithuania roughly 140 years ago. What I'm posting is my unedited capture of the original print, which is some odd medium that I can't identify. Notice how washed out the faces are.

Now compare this partially restored version. Ignore the sepia toning, which isn't relevant. Look at the faces. You'll see that I have been able to restore some of the contrast, for example, in the cheeks. I did this by using the multiply blend mode on a duplicate layer, with a soft brush painting on the adjustments.




I first encountered this technique in a tutorial about restorations, but I now use it often in images like yours, when I need to darken an area that is so light that it has almost no detail.

Dan

[The amateur]

Dan, I don't know how to thank you enough for so much effort on what seems like a simple task.

I'm truly grateful for the explanation, which although not overly detailed, provides enough clues to tackle issues of this kind.
I'll now investigate and work on the matter.
What I need is to know how precisely select the highlights.

Thank you very much once again! Your help was and is invaluable.

Cheers !

[Geoff F]

There are several ways to make adjustments on small areas of an image.

I usually make two or more conversions of the original Raw image (adjusted for midtones, shadows, or highlights as required) and stack them, then use the hide (or reveal) option before carefully making alterations. Varying the brush size and opacity means you can make adjustments to small areas of an image. Using different Blend Mode options can be useful. This is similar to Dan's method.

Another option is to use Tone Masks or Luminosity Masks. This involves using Curves and creating a temporary monochrome image which is used to produce a luminosity mask which can be used on the colour image after the temporary monochrome image has been deleted. I have used this principle in the past but I found it rather complicated. Somebody else can probably explain the principle better than my attempts.

[The amateur]

Geoff, thank you so much for another contribution.
Luminosity Masks were something I'd been searching for a long time, then completely abandoned. But now that the issue arises again, I've revisited trying to understand how they function.

Yesterday – now is early morning – was dedicated to the research that had already been initiated, with the same perspective: improving images by clearly extracting detail from exposed areas.

Consequently, I watched several videos, including some from PixImperfect and photoshopCAFE, which I find very interesting and educational. Without paying for any tutorials, Colin from photoshopCAFE helped construct an action for the precise selection of desired masks.

The process of creating and managing masks in Photoshop seems a bit complicated or at least labor-intensive. Personally, I prefer working primarily in LR and addressing problematic areas of excessive light or deep shadow, then moving to Photoshop to handle those areas. Or perhaps the other way around, I don't know...

Geoff mentions the use of Blend Modes, which are almost entirely unfamiliar to me. Not that I don't have a very basic understanding of what they are and how they function, but I've never ventured into processes that I know very little about.

Daniel's approach seems particularly effective, yielding genuinely good results.

However, I must say that I also checked and downloaded some unpaid add-ons yesterday, which allowed me to perceive the complexity of such applications. I don't embark on such endeavours because I lack the patience to learn everything proposed in these fantastic image processing works.

On the other hand, creating macros following Colin's instructions (photoshopCAFE) seems particularly interesting and easy to follow, yielding fantastic results.

Before finishing this post, a couple of days ago, I experimented with Color Range, which seemed to yield beautiful results at least in the hair.
Truly, Photoshop must have 525 ways to accomplish a specific task. The worst (or best) part is that we shouldn't confine ourselves to just one method of work but should be able to execute others to adapt each task to the specificity of the work intended.

Cheers !

The zoom was a great one !

Perhaps someone is interested in this Luminosity Masks Panels Review

[DanK]

Antonio,

I think it might make this easier to clearly separate two things: how do you select areas to work on, and how do you do the work on them?

The first category includes selections, brushes, masks, luminosity masks, color range masks, and gradients. Lightroom has improved enormously over the past half dozen years in terms of the selection methods it offers. LR's selection tools still aren't as good as Photoshop's, but they are now quite good, and the proportion of my editing that I do in Lightroom has increased a lot as a result. In particular, the inclusion of AI-based selections has made work a lot faster.

The second question is how to change areas that you've already suggested. LR has improved in this respect also, but nowhere nearly as much. Parametric editing just doesn't seem to be as capable in this regard as pixel-based editing. For example, the small area touch up tools (cloning, spot healing, etc.) are considerably better in Photoshop, particularly if you have to make a lot of corrections in a small area.

One of the tools that makes photoshop more powerful for making the changes is blend modes. There are a lot of them, I think nearly 30 (I didn't go count), but I only use a few. Changes made with the "normal" blend work like similar edits in photoshop. The multiply blend mode I already explained. I don't use it all that often, but when it's useful, as in the examples I gave, there is no substitute in LR. The third one I use often is luminosity. When doing edits in RGB space, as in LR or with the normal blend in photoshop, changes in tonality, such as increases in contrast or burning, change saturation as well as tonality. To avoid this, you can simply change any given adjustment layer in photoshop to the luminosity mode. Then the adjustment changes only tonality not saturation. This is particularly helpful for local adjustments. Finally, I use overlay (or hard or soft light, which are similar) for a very specific purpose: sharpening using a high-pass filter. The other blend modes I generally ignore.

Of the ones I use other than normal, the one that I consider an essential tool is luminosity.

Dan

[The amateur]

Another significant contribution to the discussion, this time from Dan !
Thank you very much!

As it turns out, I was already familiar with Multiply, Overlay, and Luminosity !
However, I never actually use these tools, but I'll pay more attention to them and gather information online, spending some time going through various credible tutorials.

Regarding sharpening, even though I've used the High-pass Filter before, I no longer do so, although without any particular reason.

Cheers !

[Chataignier]

I'm a long time fan and user of Tony Kuyper's tools for luminosity masks. I suppose that advances in LR and PS make the need for add-ons like TK less pressing, but I use them regularly, mainly out of habit/familiarity. Worth a look if you are not familiar with them.

https://goodlight.us/

[DanK]

I'm a long time fan and user of Tony Kuyper's tools for luminosity masks. I suppose that advances in LR and PS make the need for add-ons like TK less pressing, but I use them regularly, mainly out of habit/familiarity. Worth a look if you are not familiar with them.

https://goodlight.us/

I use Tony Kuyper's TK tools as well and like them a great deal. However, they are ENORMOUSLY complicated and offer a huge number of functions, many of which aren't actually luminosity masking. Initially, I found it really daunting to learn. I eventually realized that almost everything of interest to me was in the relatively simple Multi-Mask panel, and I don't even install the rest. That made learning much less daunting.

Re high-pass sharpening: I find it's useful for images that involve a lot of lines and less in the way of other detail. When I can't decide, I sometimes create two sharpening layers in photoshop, one with smart sharpen and the other with a high-pass filter, and turn them on and off to compare. However, Lightroom's sharpening tools are now quite powerful, and I sometimes use those and rely on the masking slider to accomplish some of what I might use a high-pass filter to accomplish.

For example, this photo, which I posted recently in another thread, was processed entirely in Lightroom, including sharpening. If I had been in Photoshop, I most likely would have used a high-pass filter to sharpen it.

[The amateur]

This shred has indeed been the subject of many different approaches for understanding and processing images, from basic treatment with the two most commonly used tools in this field to more or less sophisticated add-ons.
All contributions have been of great importance for understanding the creative process.

Thank you all for participating and for all the lines you've written, which were necessary for us to better understand the options available throughout the software.

Cheers !