And Now, For Something Totally Different...

If you’re a frequent reader of The Kayview Gallery you know that most of the images have the color saturation maxed out.  Big, bright, bold colors that make use of Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers in a reasonably unique way  At least I haven’t done the way we do it being used by others.  Making a separate Adjustment Layer for each of the possible colors.  (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue , and Magenta.)  The reason for using the ALs in this manner is not so each color can be adjusted independently, but to have a mask available for each color.  One part of an image might need a high amount of blue saturation, while other parts go neon with the same amount.  Having a mask specifically for the blue adjustment gives the ability to take away the neon blue areas.  If the blues in other areas need a different amount of saturation additional blue Adjustment Layers can be added.  This gives better control over the results.  Better than using shades of gray on a single mask.  Several images here on the gallery have had multiple Hue/Saturation Adjustment layers for one or more colors.  Today’s image takes the control of the colors through the use of the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers in the opposite direction.  Today’s image bounced back and forth between Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 several times.  Some things are better done in CS5 and others in LR3.  To find out what was done where, hit the “read more”.

First an admission, this is a remake of a very old image. So old that the Meta Data doesn’t even record the date it was originally taken. One of the things I did when I was at Intel was to introduce new digital things to the people in the retail stores. Our team would have all the latest gadgets to take around and amaze the sales people with “the next big thing”. We talked about USB, DVDs, processors and all manner of things as they were coming out on computers. Our team was given some of the first retail level digital cameras to play with in the stores. The first one we had was from HP and was 640 x 480 resolution. Less than one Megapixel images. Today’s image probably comes from the first digital camera I bought for my personal use. It was a three Megapixel Fuji and it was a thousand dollar camera. Today’s image might go back to the early of mid 1990s. Today’s image is a modification of the original alteration of the image as it came out of the camera. Even back then I was altering the images.

What’s different in today’s edition of the image? The bottom quarter was much darker than what’s seen today. The Adjustment Brush in LR3 was used to make targeted adjustments of the water and the rocks. The water got slightly more Brightness than the rocks. The major trees were darkened by reducing the Brightness along their trunks. The rocks along the stream at about the midpoint on the left side got a little bump in brightness, as did the sun lit area on the opposite shore.

One of the major and first adjustments was to remove as much pixelization as possible. Going to the Effects Panel and bringing the Noise Reduction sliders up to the merged the wider surfaces, reducing the appearance of noise. Was it was was actually pixelization due to the low resolution.

The sky was brought down just a touch. Anything to really bring the sky to a deeper blue resulted in red outlines defining each cloud.

An enlargement of the original hangs in our bedroom. It just might be replaced by today’s remake.