Workboat C&C please

This work for anyone? I cloned out a pole and wires to give an idea of how near lands end we were. Any ideas I'd be glad to hear.

Nice shot. Whereabouts is this?

The one thing I'd say is that the pic seems to have a green cast to it on my monitor. I'm on a Mac but am calibrated to use a "PC" gamma of 1.8. Hopefully you don't mind, but I pulled the image into PS and ran it through a couple of curves to shift the cast I was seeing. To my mind, it came out a lot cleaner looking, and really helps to emphasize the different grass tones that you've managed to capture so well. If our displays aren't calibrated very well to each other's, this may look overly red to you, but after sampling a neutral colour from the image and measuring it for RGB content, I'm pretty sure that this ought to look a little snappier to you

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Irreverent wrote in post #5839053
The one thing I'd say is that the pic seems to have a green cast to it on my monitor. I'm on a Mac but am calibrated to use a "PC" gamma of 1.8. Hopefully you don't mind, but I pulled the image into PS and ran it through a couple of curves to shift the cast I was seeing. To my mind, it came out a lot cleaner looking, and really helps to emphasize the different grass tones that you've managed to capture so well. If our displays aren't calibrated very well to each other's, this may look overly red to you, but after sampling a neutral colour from the image and measuring it for RGB content, I'm pretty sure that this ought to look a little snappier to you

Yep Irreverent, the colors now look great on my monitor now as well.

Nice image bpiper7!

Irreverent wrote in post #5839053
Nice shot. Whereabouts is this?

Thanks. It's on Tangier Island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

I'm at another display this morning and your version does look better. Though I would never have caught it myself.

I'm curious to see the two on the display I did my work on.

I guess I gotta break down and calibrate. I thought the only problem I had was brightness.

Thanks for the advice.

seaside wrote in post #5839119
Nice image bpiper7!

Thanks.

Irreverent,

Got home and checked it on my other monitor and it was brighter as expected but the colors were about the same as on my work monitor. You improved it much. I saved the PS file I worked from so I'll be trying to reproduce your effect. Thanks again.

Excellent composition. I only wish there was a human. Doing some thing.. walking or standing or sleeping...

ghosh wrote in post #5846807
Excellent composition. I only wish there was a human. Doing some thing.. walking or standing or sleeping...

Thank you.

Sunday Morning on Tangier Island nobody's working the water.

Only 600 people live on the island and most all of them work the water. Sundays are for church and sleep I guess. A few people working the ferry port and the few that shear the tourist sheep that come off the ferry were all that were about until Church let out. The waterfront was empty on the way out too.

There was a mastif in one of the workhouses but he was too deep in the shadows to catch.

It's a POV that you don't often get. From the water and high up.

Thanks for looking.

bpiper7 wrote in post #5844427
Irreverent,

Got home and checked it on my other monitor and it was brighter as expected but the colors were about the same as on my work monitor. You improved it much. I saved the PS file I worked from so I'll be trying to reproduce your effect. Thanks again.

You're welcome

While my adjustments may have slightly oversaturated the image on reflection (I also added some extra contrast to go along with the colour correction, and I think I overcooked it a touch), that would be fairly easy to take care of. As for the colour cast itself, all I did was to correct the photo "by the numbers"

If you're interested, here's how I did it in Photoshop:

1. I created a "Threshold" adjustment layer for the purposes of establishing the lightest and darkest portions of the image. Open the adjustment layer and then drag the slider toward the left. As you do so more and more of the image will turn white. Keep doing this until there is only a small portion of black left. This represents the darkest areas of your image. If you now shift+click in the image window over one of those black areas (for me it was an area over the barrel on the back of the boat) you will set an eyedropper at that point. If you now look at the info palette, you will have an eyedropper there labelled "1" with an RGB readout showing you the RGB content of that point. (note before starting this go to your eyedropper tool and in the options bar at the top of the window select something other than "point" sample - 5x5 average is good for an image this size - this just prevents you accidentally sampling a pixel of noise). Next repeat the procedure moving the slider all the way over to the right until there is only a small portion of white left. This represents the lightest point in your image. For me that was an area on the roof of the boat. Once again shift+click in that area to set a second sample point. You can now click "cancel" on the Threashold adjustment as you no longer need it. You could just pick the white and black points by eye, but I find the eye is sometimes deceiving, and the Threshold command just lets you maintain a degree of accuracy.

2. Now that you have set samplers for your white and black points, it's time to set a sampler over a neutral colour in the image. A good candidate to my eyes is the paintwork on the shed as it looks like it isn't supposed to have any kind of colour cast to it. So with the eye-dropper selected, shift click to set a third sampler point in an area of flat neutral space somewhere over the paintwork on the shed.

3. Now to fix things. You can do all this from one Curves adjustment layer, by using the info palette to guide your adjustments. So - here's why we took those colour samples from the image. The first one was to find the darkest point in the image - now, given that black in RGB mode is represented by 0 for R,G and B, ideally we want to have a dark point that lies somewhere around 10 for each channel. A value of 10 helps to retain detail in the shadows, and the same value across all three channels represents a neutral colour with no cast. So look at the info palette and see what RGB values you currently have for sampler 1. My values were 8,11,10 - which is pretty darned good, but suggest a slight lack of red in the shadow ares, and maybe a tiny shade too much green. Here's how to fix it.

4. Open a Curves adjustment layer. Click on "Curve Display Options" at the bottom of the dialogue and double check that you have "Show amount of" to "light" and not "pigment". From this point on you can work with the keyboard. I'm on a Mac, and I use the Cmd key - if you're doing this on Windows, just use the CTRL key instead. Hit Cmd+1 to jump across to the Red channel (or pick it from the drop down list at the top), and then hit ctrl+Tab once until you see the small square at the bottom left diagonal of the box selected. This represents the shadow area of your red channel. Now, using the arrow keys we want to nudge this point so that it changes the readout of the "R" channel on our "1" sampler in the info palette to 10. If the value is currently less than 10, then hit the "up" arrow key to raise it. If the value is currently more than 10, nudge to the right to lower it. Hit Cmd+2 to switch to the green channel, and repeat the process. Then Cmd+3 to do the same for the blue channel.

5. Now that the shadows are sorted, time to do the same for the highlights. Hit Cmd+1 to switch back to the Red channel, then ctrl+tab to select the "highlight" point in the top right corner of the curve (note that using ctrl+tab as opposed to just clicking on the point prevents you from accidentally moving it. All fine adjustmens in the curves window are much more accurate if done via the keyboard). Now we need to repeat the process we just went through, instead this time, we are looking to neutralise the highlights. As pure white in RGB is represented by 255,255,255, we want to leave a little room for detail in the highlights to make sure we don't clip, so our target values are going to be 245,245,245. Run through that same nudging procedure again until your info palette now shows you that you have values of 10,10,10 for sampler 1, and 245,245,245 for sampler 2.

6. This has "fixed" the tonal range of the image in terms of neutralising the black and white points, but there is still a noticeable cast across the midtones. This is where we use the third sampler to correct the colour cast.With the curves dialogue box still open, click and drag with your mouse inside the image, and notice you will see a "ball" bouncing up and down along the tone curve reflecting the tonal values of the area you are clicking over. We need to set a point on the curve of the R G and B channels that corresponds with the neutral point we selected earlier. To do this, cmd+shift+click over the third sample point we placed in the image. This will add a point to the curve at the correct location across all the channels. Now, to neutralise the colour cast, look at the values of sampler 3 in the info palette. If the colour cast is neutral, the channels will all have the same (or very similar) values. Mine read 193,203,197 for R G and B respectively, which show a tendency toward green, and a deficiency in red. To fix this, I'm going to aim to center all the channels on the mid value here - the B channel value of 197. This requires a boosting of the red channel and a reduction in the green. So.......

7. Select the red channel in the curves dialogue box and ctrl+tab until the middle point on the curve is selected. Now use the up/down arrow keys to set this value to match that of your goal value (in my case 197). Jump across to the green channel and repeat the process, this time lowering the value to meet the target. Take a look at the info palette and double check that everything seems to be in order for all three samplers, then click ok.

8. You're done! toggle the adjustment layer on and off to confirm the changes. Trust me, this takes MUCH less time to do than it does to explain, and you should have it all done in the space of 2 mins.

Sorry if you feel patronised by the step by step examples. For all I know you're a Photoshop genius and know all this stuff like the back of your hand, but I thought for safety's sake I would assume no prior knowledge. If this is the first time you've ever done this, you may want to start to include it in your PP workflow, as I find it one of the most accurate ways to balance an image. You can then proceed to run a second curves layer after this to add an s-curve for contrast, or any other adjustment to add or remove saturation.

Hope this helps

For reference, here's the "uncooked" image, with only the changes outlined above applied to the image.

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Irreverent wrote in post #5853631
You're welcome

Sorry if you feel patronised by the step by step examples. For all I know you're a Photoshop genius and know all this stuff like the back of your hand, Hope this helps

LOL! Not at all. A rank beginner. People pay real money for that kind of information.
Thanks very much for taking the time.

My pleasure. If you have some sort of RAW processor (Lightroom, ACR, DPP) etc, you can do this MUCH quicker.

I tried this out in Lightroom and it worked like a charm. Simply change the White Balance setting from "as shot" to "auto" - it got rid of the cast in one click. If you're a rank beginner, I'd recommend taking a look at an app like Lightroom. Not only will you have a huge array of PP tools at your hands PLUS an excellent image librarian, but you'll be able to forego the rather intimidating learning curve that comes with getting to grips with Photoshop.

Good luck!