DiaAzul (1365) 2006-01-07 07:57:13

Apologies that the changes are a little heavy handed, usually it takes several iterations of changes and corrections before they look natural.

What I have tried to do in your image is draw the viewers attention away from the top left hand and the sky (where the image is brightest), to the centre bottom right around the gondola and the man (which is more interesting). To do that I increased the brightness and contrast of what I am interested in and reduced the brightness of those things I wish to de-emphasise. I also cropped the right edge of the image in order to bring the gondola/man into the bottom corner of the frame and prevent them from looking isolated in the middle of no-where.

Also, by increasing contrast between the rialto bridge, the sky and surrounding buildings it helps to make it stand out a little bit more.

Not perfect, but hopefully starts to give some ideas of things you can do to create images where you control where the viewer looks.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-10-30 14:12:08

1...Adjusted colour balance in the shadows to remove a slight red cast resulting from combination of ambient light and fill flash (photoshop add colour balance layer, select shadows, move slider -30 to cyan).

2...Created a saturation enhancement layer:
Faltten image, duplicate background, using adjustments->saturation increase overall saturation of background copy layer by 30 points.
Select adjustments->calculation.
:First part using merged, gray channel
:second part using background, gray channel
:blending difference
:result new channel
Add layer mask (reveal all) to background copy
Whilst layer mask is selected in background copy layer use ->Image->Apply Image:
: Layer use merged
: Channel use alpha 1
: Blending normal

Adjust opacity of new layer to vary the effect.

Final result is as shown.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-10-21 08:04:28

Hopeless title for what is a really simple method for adjusting an image to bring some focus to particular elements in the scene. All the following was done in Photoshop, though any reasonable piece of software should be able to do something similar.

Above the original image layer add a brightness/contrast layer. Reduce the brightness and increase contrast slightly to darken the image. In the masking layer use a large soft brush with 30% opacity (black colour) to brush out parts of the image you want to attract attention to. So in this case, I painted the original brightness/contrast back into the image for the central section of the tree trunks, and also the far sculpture and parts of the near sculpture. By darkening the surrounds the eye is naturally drawn to the lighter parts of the image.

Also added about 10 points of saturation to increase the colours slightly.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-10-14 10:37:59

A very simple workshop. Just straightened the horizon a little bit then cropped at the light strand of sky at the top of the image. This makes the boat the dominant subject of the image and retains focus - the original image the eye jumps from the boat to the light ribbon of sky and back too much for personal taste.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-10-14 10:13:43

Very simple workshop. Added a brightness contrast layer in photoshop and lightened the principal character. Then added a hue saturation layer to reduce saturation in the jumper a little to prevent blowing out individual channels and loss of detail

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-04-27 17:33:37

All actions in Photoshop CS

To clone clodes I use the following method. Select the clone tool then set the brush to a reasonable size and hardness at 50%. Pick an area of the cloud that has non blown out texture and start to paint over the blown out areas. Each time the brush is lifted I then fade (Edit->fade) the effect of the previous action to 20%, this way I can build up the effect more gradually and naturally without an obvious cloning action.

After cloning the clouds applied a curves adjustment to improve contrast.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-04-11 20:01:27

The following was done using Photoshop CS.

1/Applied shadow/highlight tool to recover some of the highlight detail in the image.
2/Used selective colour adjustment layer to increase black level in some of the colours
3/Used hue/saturation layer to adjust blue/greens in image.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-04-02 08:18:12

All actions in Photoshop CS

1/Duplicate background layer. Apply shadow/higlight to duplicate layer
2/Add curve adjustment layer to restore contrast
3/Repeat 1+2 a second time (can repeat again if needed).
4/Put all but background layer into a folder and adjust blend percentage until good balance achieved between adjusted and new image.
5/Hue/Sat - reduce saturation if necessary
6/I also duplicated the background layer again and then using a blend-if blended in the group under the tree from the original image as the adjusted image was a bit noisy.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-04-02 06:31:27

All the following was done in Photoshop CS.

1/Duplicate background and apply shadow/highlight (for both shadows and highlight 100% intestity, tonal width about 30/40%, radius 40).
2/Apply a curves layer to regain contrast.
3/Put both of these layers in a folder and adjust blending percentage to give a pleasing picture.
4/Added channel mixer and set to greyscale. Reduced blue to -20, red and green to +70. Set blending mode of this layer to luminosity.
5/Added selective colour layer and adjusted colour mix of shadows/neutral/highlights to give a pleasing tonal range and colour balance. Also worked on other colours to increase intensity.
6/Created a new blank layer and merged layers into new layer.
7/Repeated steps 1-3 on merged layers (ie re-applied shadow/highlight) blended back into original image to get pleasing result.

DiaAzul (1365) 2005-04-01 18:46:15

Used Colour Mixer in PSCS to lighten main subject, then applied tones to adjust main subjects contrast. Duplicated the background layer and blended it back into the adjusted image using a blend-if to bring back detail into the highlights. Added a saturation layer to increase saturation a bit. used perspective transformation to twist the image increasing the size of the main subject and staigtening the rear wall.

I messed up when uploading this image (the colour space is Prophoto rather than sRGB so the colours are looking very muted compared with the original workshop - sorry).