[X4U] [OT] Need Help Tweaking Photos in Photoshop

[Robert MacLeay]

On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:27:38 -0700, revDAVE <coolcat at hosting4days.com>
wrote:

> I have some inferior photos that I would like to do my best to fix up in
> Photoshop CS2. Many of them somehow turned out quite faded ... I am not sure
> why. 
> Q: Can someone help give me some suggestions as to how to proceed?

My analysis of your photo is that you are suffering from a bad case of lens
flare. You are attempting to take a photo of a scene which is generally very
dark, but contains extremely bright light sources that are shining directly
onto your camera's lens. That light is being reflected around inside the
lens and falling on the film/imaging sensor where it should not be.

Things to do to mitigate the problem:
Keep your lens fanatically clean.
Get a better lens.
Keep spotlights not merely out of the scene, but from shining onto your lens
at all (a lens hood helps).

CONTRAST ADJUSTMENT
Understand that this is basically a dark scene with a few bright spots,
which has been coated with a haze of light from the spotlights. What you
want to do is delete a certain amount of lightness (the haze) uniformly from
the entire scene. In practice, this would render the lightest parts
unacceptably dark. I would do this: In Levels, leave the white point where
it is. Move the black point until whatever parts of the scene you wish to
show as true black, are. In this example, that would be to about 51. Adjust
the midpoint triangle (gamma adjustment) to please. I wound up with input
levels set at 51-0.80-255.

COLOR BALANCE ADJUSTMENT
A check of presumably white or gray objects in the scene shows you have
decent white balance. Depending on your intent, this may or may not be a
good thing. If you want to have as natural looking a scene as possible, you
are there.  I assume that this is a function of your camera's automatic
white balance dong a good job. If, on the other hand, you want to show a
scene which reflects the actual colors that were there (incandescent spots
with typically yellow casts, often further compromised by gels placed over
them) you have your work cut out for you.  You will have to use the manual
white balance feature on your camera. Here, I would shoot with daylight
balance; this will give you the most accurate rendition of what was really
there.  This will also give you very odd looking color, quite different from
what you remember! This is because your eyes and brain have automatic color
balancing built in. To get it right you will need to duplicate your accurate
layer, perform a white balance adjustment in Photoshop to get the natural
version, and then adjust the transparency of the top layer until you get an
appropriate blend. This last step is impossible if you start with an image
which has already been automatically balanced.