Today I set out to make some Lensbaby images as the little family headed into Manly to listen to some jazz at the Manly Jazz Festival. However it started drizzling just as we set foot outside, and later the drizzle turned into steady rain throughout the entire day. Typical.
Before we left the house I had quickly grabbed The Amazing Polaroid SX-70 just in case. Usually I like to keep it simple and not confuse myself by bringing too much gear, let alone two different cameras. But I’m still learning to see with ‘Polaroid eyes’ so I thought it would be nice to have it in the bag. And as it happened I did stumble across a subject which I found better suited to the SX-70 than the Lensbaby, and this was the one and only picture I took the entire day. Not a particularly productive day photographically.
The image from the Polaroid SX-70 came out somewhat overexposed, so contrary to my test shots here and here I chose to make some basic Photoshop adjustments to this image.
I thought, therefore, I would use the image for a quick little Before and After tutorial post, showing you the basic Photoshop adjustments I made to this image.
Let’s start with the final image above. As you can see it’s really just an image of texture and to some extent also colour, but the image also displays some subtle curves and movement.
OK, so let’s look at what the image looked like straight after it was ejected from the Polaroid SX-70 and had had a few minutes to magically develop into an image.
Hmm, the original Polaroid is too bright in the brightest areas of the grasses and – to my eyes – these areas of high brightness become a distraction. My eyes are simply not relaxed looking at the image.
The first adjustment I made was a Levels adjustment. I simply moved the black point slider on the left towards the right where the data begins in the histogram. I levelled out the image data which resulted in a slightly more even exposure and increased contrast. Effectively the darkest areas in the original image becomes darker with this adjustment.
Levels adjustment
After applying the Levels adjustment I decided that I didn’t want the adjustment to affect the entire image, so I created a Layer mask and masked off some of the adjustment in the top left and bottom right corners of the image. The darker areas below show where I have masked off the effect of the Levels adjustment.
Levels layer mask
At this stage I still felt that the grasses in the left part of the image were too bright, so I proceeded with a Curves adjustment to lower the brightness of those grasses.
Curves adjustment #01
I used the first Curves adjustment to darken the image overall. However since I only really wanted to darken the the brighter grasses I applied a Layer mask to control the adjustment so it only affected local areas of the image.
I filled the entire Layer mask with black (initially masking off the entire Curves adjustment to the image) and then painted with the Brush Tool using white paint to apply the adjustment locally.
I use a Wacom Intuos tablet to paint in local adjustments like this by hand.
The brighter areas below show where I have applied the Curves adjustment to the image.
Curves layer mask #01
The above Curves adjustment brought me pretty close to where I wanted to be in tems of exposure, brightness and contrast.
However I still felt I needed to tone back some of the brighter areas just a touch more. Instead of messing around with the first Curves adjustment I simply went ahead with a second Curves adjustment.
Curves adjustment #02
I used another Layer mask to control the adjustment locally. Again I filled the mask with black and painted in the adjustment with my Wacom Intuos tablet.
Curves layer mask #02
I’m now happy with the overall exposure, brightness and contrast in the image. This is when I will typically start looking at colour. So in this case I decided to bump up the Vibrance and Saturation of the colour in the image.
Vibrance and Saturation adjustment
While I quite like the colour in the image I can’t help but feel it’s a bit too saturated and has lost some the original appeal of the colour that the Polaroid 600 film produces.
In some ways I go backwards the way I decide to deal with the colour in the next step. I applied a Black & White adjustment layer effectively draining the image of all colour, but then I used the Opacity slider to only partially apply the Black & White adjustment.
After playing around with the Opacity slider for a little white I settled at around 33% which resulted in the final image you see above. You could also say that I only applied the Black & White adjustment layer at 33% strength, or since I reduced the Opacity of the Black & White adjustment, you could say I injected about 67% colour back into the image. Hmm, I hope this makes sense.
Black & White adjustment
The slightly more subdued colours that resulted from this adjustment were more true to the original image and I was happy with the outcome, so I saved the layered file as a.PSD file (my master file) so that I can always come back to it if I wish to change any of the adjustments.
If you are new to Photoshop you will often find yourself going back to older images as your Photoshop skills increases.
All of the above adjustments were made to a high resolution scanned TIFF file of the original Polaroid image, and I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to make the adjustments.
There are no doubt that there are lots of other – possibly easier – ways of arriving at a similar result, but the above describes the approach I took to this image. I hope you enjoyed this little Before and After tutorial.
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Sun, Oct 4, 2009
Before and After