Steps in recreating the method to the madness..........
1. First I opened both images in Photoshop and Duplicated adjustment-1 photo.
2. Opened the Histogram and compared this with the 2 photos.
3. Refreshed Histogram and opened All Channels View and Show Colors in Channel View.
4. Image - Adjustments - Levels - Raised the Gamma to 1.3 - white Highlights value changed to 243 - black Shadows value changed to 35
5. Contrast - 85
In steps 4 and 5, I was trying to bring out the details in the road and darken the truck. I also was looking at keeping the windows in the buildings in sharpness. Figured playing with the contrast would help.
6. Shadows/Highlights - Shadows 80 - Tonal Width - 50 Radius 100; Highlights 10 – Tonal Width – 50 Radius 100; Adjustments Color correction +10 - Midtone Contrast +50
7. Levels - black 24 - gamma .58 - white 255
8. Hue/Saturation Hue +180 – Saturation -74 – Lightness +5 This took out a lot of the color in the photo leaving just a hint of red tone, which was good. Green was still in the picture and I needed to lighten up the photo more, get rid of the clouds also. I keep going back and forth between the 2 photos looking at the Histogram and Channels trying to match them up. Not an easy thing to do.
9. Adjustments - Color Balance. Here is where I played with Tone Balance - Shadows, Midtones and Highlights and played and played and played. Its getting better but I still have GREEN in the picture and clouds visible in the sky.
10. Then I tried Curves - HELP!
Now I am starting over…. Once again I duplicated the adjustment-1 photo. This time I played with the Brightness/Contrast. I can’t remember the exact input numbers, but I bumped the contrast up quite a bit. Then I played with Color Balance and Hue/Saturation. Image - Adjustments - Color Balance. I liked Color Balance because you could separate the Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights and also the red, greens, and blues colors. Hue Separation was nice because of the separation of colors for individual adjustments. Using Hue Separation I pushed the sliders to the max and min to see what colors affected what areas of the photo.
The hardest parts for me were trying to bring out the contrast in the road and in the windows of the buildings and at the same time fade out the clouds and blur out the mail logo on the mail truck and the Alaska 50 celebration sign next to the mail truck all the while keeping the photo a sepia color tone. I could play with this forever trying to get it just right. Still not satisfied with my results, because now the green hue is gone and there is too much of a pink hue, but I’ve got to let it go for now.
ORIGINAL PHOTO
FINAL REDO
Wow thats really good. Thanks for all the detailed notes, it helps to see what other people are doing. I'm a little overwhelmed by Curves myself and yeah Color Balance is cool, I made a lot of progress with it.
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