Figure 1: the TIFF file prior to processing. Taken during the evening in low light with flash. The flash was at or near the limit of its range and as a result has had minimal effect. The flute player dressed in light coloured clothing is surrounded by very dark timber which is dimly lit by overhead lanterns. With today's digital cameras and their excellent high ISO performance, pushing the ISO up to 800, 1600 or higher would go a long way to avoiding the underexposure we see here but given this image was taken a decade ago and not yesterday, we'll just have to do the best we can. The image will be used full frame so no cropping required and very few dust spots so only limited use of the spot healing brush (keyboard shortcut J) required. (I won't give a detailed example of this here as the spots at this displayed image size are barely visible anyway)
Figure 2: A levels adjustment layer to set the black and white points. In this image the histogram is stacked at the left end with dark tones with some pure blacks already present, so I left the black point as is. At the other end however there are very few light tones and no pure whites so I've moved the white point sider considerably left.
How far is far enough? As we move the right slider (the white point slider) left, the centre or mid tone slider also moves left proportionally so that the entire image becomes lighter. By holding down the Alt/Option key as we move the slider, those highlights that are clipped, or blown, show up as white on the screen. In this case I was prepared to have just some slight clipping of the lightest values on the flute player's clothing.
Figure 3: A curves adjustment layer was used to open up or lighten the shadows in the image. As can be seen left, I placed several points on the line at the mid tone and highlight levels to anchor them and then raised the curve at the shadow level or quarter tone level.
There is a limit to how far you can go with this. Shadow areas lightened too much can really break up and take on a noisy appearance. In this case I took it to the point where I believed it was still acceptable.
So what's acceptable as far as shadow noise goes? Well it depends among other things on how large you want the final image to be. The larger the image dimensions the more apparent the noise and image break up. In this case I'm happy with a relatively small image for web display. I'd be reluctant to enlarge the image too much further and I doubt it would print well larger than A4 size.
Notice that whilst the timber behind the musician, and the lanterns, are lighter and revealing more detail, the bottom left corner is unchanged. I found that corner to be distracting to the overall composition and so masked it so as not to be impacted by the curves adjustment. I'll discuss masking further a little later in this essay.
Figure 4: Next step was a hue/saturation adjustment layer. In this case I left the hue alone but boosted the overall saturation. I particularly wanted to bring up the colours in those lanterns and the red tassels hanging from them.
In order to boost all the colours I initially used the "master" setting from the drop down menu at the top of the dialogue box. However I specifically wanted to boost the red and yellow values independently of the other colours as well.
From the drop down menu I selected the red and then the yellow options and boosted each one in turn. Rather than clicking and selecting each in turn, it's easy to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between the colours.
For the red values: Ctrl/Command 1,
for yellow: Ctrl/Command 2
for green: Ctrl/Command 3, and so on for green, cyan, blue and magenta in turn. To return to the "master" setting at any point: Ctrl/Command ~. The same keyboard shortcuts also apply to selective colour adjustments as well.
Figure 5: Selective colour adjustments. At this point I decided I wanted even more saturation and a lighter tone in the reds particularly in those tassels. Using a selective colour adjustment layer I dragged the cyan slider way down.
Cyan being the complimentary colour to red, a reduction in the cyan is effectively an increase in the amount of red. An increase in the redness of the red so to speak.
In order to lighten the red tones I moved the black slider to the left.
Figure 6: Selective colour adjustments. Same process as described above only this time targeting the yellows. I wanted to increase the yellows in those lanterns to give a warm golden tone.
So same principle, in this case increasing the yellow saturation by boosting the yellow component in the yellows. In addition I increased the red component in the yellows by reducing the cyan values.
As with the reds, I wanted to lighten the yellows further and so again I moved the black slider left.
As it turned out, I felt the yellow colour adjustment didn't take me far enough and so I doubled up the effect by duplicating the adjustment layer. This was done via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/Command J.
Figure 7: Dodge and burn layer. Not an adjustment layer as such but a pixel bearing layer created via the create new layer icon and then filling with 50% grey. With the new layer created, keyboard shortcut Shift+F5 to bring up the fill layer dialog box, and then I chose 50% grey from the drop down menu. From there I put the new layer into soft light blend mode. Doing this has no immediate effect on the image. The effect is seen when you use a soft edged brush at low opacity, say 10%, and then brush with white over those parts of the image you wish to lighten and with a black brush over the parts you wish to darken.
The screen capture at left shows this dodge and burn layer on its own. This view can be achieved by holding down the Alt/Option key and clicking on the layer visibility icon (that's the eyeball to the left of the layer) this turns off all other layers so that the selected layer can be viewed in isolation. It's a handy technique to keep in mind as it allows you to quickly check on your progress with a particular layer or mask.
As can be seen I used a soft edged black brush at low opacity to darken the distracting lower part of the frame. Whilst I normally use just black and white brushes on such a layer to simply affect the lightness and darkness of parts of the image, in this case I decided to use a yellow brush to further highlight and colour those glowing lanterns. With a very soft larger brush at very low opacity, I painted over and around the lanterns to add to the glowing effect.
