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View Full Version : Brightening up a dark, dreary, no-good, lousy day.


Darkhorse
26th of February 2005 (Sat), 19:38
Everyday can't be sunny, especially in England. I'm moving there in a matter of days for some design and illustration work and so the photographic possibilities may be more limited... or maybe I'm not taking some creative post production fine-tuning into account.

I'm asking for techniques I can use for these gray days. The following is one thing I recently worked on:

The photo on the left is one I took last December. As you can imagine the weather at this time was crap. Everything pretty gray. So I first did a channel mixer adjustment warming up some of the colours then I duplicated the image in another layer an adjusted the mid tone levels severely so that details and colours emerged out of the clouds but this made St.Paul's pretty black, so the next task was to make a layer mask on that layer and paint out the black church so the bright one underneath would emerge. Then it was a simple matter of dodging the busses, editing the fringe, some other level adjustments and done. It still could use some noise reduction in the sky but you get the idea.

http://formerairline.com/messageboards/stpauls1.jpg http://formerairline.com/messageboards/stpauls2.jpg

Any other ideas or techniques you can share?

PacAce
26th of February 2005 (Sat), 20:00
Since you asked...

The original image has too much contrast to begin with so what I would do in your place is to "lighten" up the shadow areas using Shadow/Highlight (or equivalent tool if you don't have PSCS) and expose a little more to the shadow details. I also increased the saturation of the image a tad.

And this is what I end up with. Using this as a starting point, you can work on the sky and the other parts of the image that you think needs more "brightening" up.