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UZI on Soft lacks punch - NO MORE!

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Pieter80420

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I am a great advocate for shooting with the UZI set to soft, because it gives less noise, no sharpening artifacts, and leaves the best oppurtunity for postprocessing.

However the soft setting results in images that is a little too flat and undersaturated for my liking, and I ended up editing each image to correct.

After doing this on a lot of images, I think I have finally come up with a process that put the punch back in the images. The left is out of camera and the right is "punched up"



Original here: http://www.pbase.com/image/1406467/original

I have created an action for this as follows:

1) Make adjustment layer - Levels; 2,230
2) Make adjustment layer - Hue/Saturation; Saturation +12
3) Select Background
4) Unsharp Mask: 25%, 50 pixels, Threshold 5
5) Unsharp Mask: 500%, 0.2 pixels, Threshold 3
6) Smartblur: R 0.6; Threshold 7; Quality Low

This gives me very clean, well balanced and natural looking images. About 90-95% of my images comes out perfect (too my taste) without any further processing.

The values can be tweaked a little to your personal taste. Give it a try and tell me what you think.
--Spannie
 
Thanks for step-by-step run down.......I'll have to try it and see how I like it.

dboogie
--Free your mind and everything else will follow
 
Hi Spannie,

What you did is normally what you're supposed to do. As you might already know that if you set the camera to 'normal' setting,then in-camera sharpning seems to do too much.So that's why you want to set it to 'soft' so that it leaves some room to touch the image to suite your taste.

Hide
 
Can anybody translate what Spannie did (I guess using PS 6.0) into PS Elements? (I always shoot on "normal" with my c700 because I don't think PSE's "sharpening" filter is too good)
 
She is using Photoshop complete version, not element or LE. adjustment layers let you adjust an image without actually touching your original. If you are not satisfied with the result you can just continue adjusting the layer or simply delete it. but your original image is not modified until you set it.

Photoshop Element do not have layers or actions, so you would need the full version of Photoshop in order to use layers. You can however do the rest of the process without the layers.
dmlove said:
Can anybody translate what Spannie did (I guess using PS 6.0) into
PS Elements? (I always shoot on "normal" with my c700 because I
don't think PSE's "sharpening" filter is too good)
Click to expand...
--Daniella http://www.pbase.com/zylenC7OO discussion group: http://www.homepet.com/cgi-bin/c700/UltraBoard.cgi
 
Daniella68313 said:
Daniella wrote:
Photoshop Element do not have layers or actions, so you would need
the full version of Photoshop in order to use layers.
Click to expand...
Daniella... apparently you do not have Elements, because it does have layers. You can follow Spannie's instructions manaully step by step to achieve the same results. The difference is you can not use Spannie's procedure as a plugin Photoshop Action in Elements.

--Bob 'MacTarheel'Olympus CAMEDIA C-2100 Ultra Zoom http://www.pbase.com/mactarheel/galleries 'Proud to support pbase'
 
no i don't have it yet, Olympus is supposed to send me the cd.

I have read in this forum that Element did not have layers and action and that was the difference with the full version of Photoshop.

It is great little program if it has layers..i am looking forward to see this.

Do you knwo the difference between Photoshop Elmenent and Photoshop LE?
MacTarheel said:
MacTarheel said:
Daniella wrote:
Photoshop Element do not have layers or actions, so you would need
the full version of Photoshop in order to use layers.
Click to expand...
Daniella... apparently you do not have Elements, because it does
have layers. You can follow Spannie's instructions manaully step
by step to achieve the same results. The difference is you can not
use Spannie's procedure as a plugin Photoshop Action in Elements.

--
Bob 'MacTarheel'
Olympus CAMEDIA C-2100 Ultra Zoom
http://www.pbase.com/mactarheel/galleries
'Proud to support pbase'
Click to expand...
--Daniella http://www.pbase.com/zylenC7OO discussion group: http://www.homepet.com/cgi-bin/c700/UltraBoard.cgi
 
Thanks for sharing that. I'm fascinated by the fact that you can use set parameters that work for most of your pictures. I have to make different adjustments from picture to picture.

I find most of the type of adjustments you are using are consistent with what lots of photos need but I would think the actual numbers would vary by camera and by individual photo.

My 2100 pictures never need an increase in saturation but sometimes they need a decrease. And, even when shot in Soft mode they often need less sharpening than you've been using.

I wish one action do it for me. :-(
--Olympus 3O4O and Olympus 21OOUZ http://www.pbase.com/ro2001
 
Daniella68313 said:
Daniella wrote:
I have read in this forum that Element did not have layers and
action and that was the difference with the full version of
Photoshop.
Click to expand...
I missed reading that here but whoever said it was mistaken. It does not have "actions" per se, but it does have "effects" which are similar to actions.
Daniella68313 said:
It is great little program if it has layers..i am looking forward
to see this.
Click to expand...
Trust me, it has layers and, yes, it is a great program.
Daniella68313 said:
Do you knwo the difference between Photoshop Elmenent and Photoshop LE?
Click to expand...
Sorry, I can't help you on this one. I try not to comment on programs that I do not have. Perhaps someone else can help you on this one.

--Bob 'MacTarheel'Olympus CAMEDIA C-2100 Ultra Zoom http://www.pbase.com/mactarheel/galleries 'Proud to support pbase'
 
I have both Elements and LE.

They both have layers, but are limited in some of the things you can do with them. I don't think LE has adjustment layers, and Elements only offers the following types from the "new adjustment layer" menu:

levels, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, gradient map, invert, threshold, and polarize.

The biggest difference (for me) between Elements and LE is that LE only has one level of "undo" while Elements has the history palette, and the addition of the panorama making tool.

To LE's advantage, it has a "curves" adjustment tool which Elements lacks, and Ctrl-H correctly hides/shows the selection marquee "marching ants" which you apparently can only choose from a menu in Elements.

There are other differences, but it's clear that one is not a well defined subset of the other. On the whole, I think they did a better job of the total feature set in Elements. It always seemed totally ludicrous to me that Adobe's image editors designed for beginners only had one step of undo, when those are the people who are going to "oops" the most.
Daniella said:
I have read in this forum that Element did not have layers and
action and that was the difference with the full version of
Photoshop.

It is great little program if it has layers..i am looking forward
to see this.

Do you knwo the difference between Photoshop Elmenent and Photoshop
LE?
MacTarheel said:
Daniella68313 said:
Daniella wrote:
Photoshop Element do not have layers or actions, so you would need
the full version of Photoshop in order to use layers.
Click to expand...
Daniella... apparently you do not have Elements, because it does
have layers. You can follow Spannie's instructions manaully step
by step to achieve the same results. The difference is you can not
use Spannie's procedure as a plugin Photoshop Action in Elements.

--
Bob 'MacTarheel'
Olympus CAMEDIA C-2100 Ultra Zoom
http://www.pbase.com/mactarheel/galleries
'Proud to support pbase'
Click to expand...
--
Daniella
http://www.pbase.com/zylen
C7OO discussion group:
http://www.homepet.com/cgi-bin/c700/UltraBoard.cgi
Click to expand...
 
Roberta

I somewhat agree that you can not get one action (or process) that fixes everything perfectly in every image. What this does for me is allows me to run "all" my images to get it very close. I would then fine-tune the ones that I really like and need to make prints from, etc.

A lot of the processing is really up to each person's (very) personal taste - I fully agree with you on that.

What this action helps me with is to correct the effect of the camera's soft setting. This is remarkably successful and consistant on images taken under various conditions (sunny, cloudy, flash, etc.)

It is interesting that you comment that your camera's saturation appears to be on the high side. I don't think I have seen a single image from mine (that was correctly exposed) taken in soft mode, that was not slightly undersaturated. Can it be differences in personal preferences, or monitor calibration? Or do our cameras handle saturation differently? Interesting!?!?

Spannie
Roberta said:
Thanks for sharing that. I'm fascinated by the fact that you can
use set parameters that work for most of your pictures. I have to
make different adjustments from picture to picture.

I find most of the type of adjustments you are using are consistent
with what lots of photos need but I would think the actual numbers
would vary by camera and by individual photo.
My 2100 pictures never need an increase in saturation but sometimes
they need a decrease. And, even when shot in Soft mode they often
need less sharpening than you've been using.

I wish one action do it for me. :-(

--
Olympus 3O4O and Olympus 21OOUZ
http://www.pbase.com/ro2001
Click to expand...
--Spannie
 
Spannie said:
I am a great advocate for shooting with the UZI set to soft,
because it gives less noise, no sharpening artifacts, and leaves
the best oppurtunity for postprocessing.

However the soft setting results in images that is a little too
flat and undersaturated for my liking, and I ended up editing each
image to correct.

After doing this on a lot of images, I think I have finally come up
with a process that put the punch back in the images. The left is
out of camera and the right is "punched up"



Original here: http://www.pbase.com/image/1406467/original

I have created an action for this as follows:

1) Make adjustment layer - Levels; 2,230
2) Make adjustment layer - Hue/Saturation; Saturation +12
3) Select Background
4) Unsharp Mask: 25%, 50 pixels, Threshold 5
5) Unsharp Mask: 500%, 0.2 pixels, Threshold 3
6) Smartblur: R 0.6; Threshold 7; Quality Low

This gives me very clean, well balanced and natural looking images.
About 90-95% of my images comes out perfect (too my taste) without
any further processing.

The values can be tweaked a little to your personal taste. Give it
a try and tell me what you think.

--
Spannie
Click to expand...
-- http://www.pbase.com/mofongo/galleries 'It's a dog eat dog world and Ergo's wearing milkbone underwear'. Don't ask how I know that...
 
Daniella,

No offence here - but just to set the facts straight - I'm a "he".

I've found an interesting (but ugly) way to get PS Elements to do actions! It can do actions, but you can not (normally) get it to do your own developed or downloaded actions. I've done it on the trial version which I've downloaded and only have a couple of days left. However, you can not create you own actions with it, and it will sometimes stumble over things that PS can that it can't. So you're limited to include functions that Elements can handle.
Daniella said:
Photoshop Element do not have layers or actions, so you would need
the full version of Photoshop in order to use layers. You can
however do the rest of the process without the layers.
dmlove said:
Can anybody translate what Spannie did (I guess using PS 6.0) into
PS Elements? (I always shoot on "normal" with my c700 because I
don't think PSE's "sharpening" filter is too good)
Click to expand...
--
Daniella
http://www.pbase.com/zylen
C7OO discussion group:
http://www.homepet.com/cgi-bin/c700/UltraBoard.cgi
Click to expand...
--Spannie
 
Spannie said:
It is interesting that you comment that your camera's saturation
appears to be on the high side. I don't think I have seen a single
image from mine (that was correctly exposed) taken in soft mode,
that was not slightly undersaturated. Can it be differences in
personal preferences, or monitor calibration? Or do our cameras
handle saturation differently? Interesting!?!?
Click to expand...
I would say yes to all.

I do think that many people don't realize there is enormous variation from one camera to another even within same models.

Often I hear people complain that their cameras aren't focusing well or their colors aren't quite right and want to know what they're doing wrong. Although it certainly isn't the only possibility one should consider that the camera itself may be at fault. I know that I've returned my first 3040 and my first 2100- both times the second ones took better photos. My friend Pat, who posts here, has been through 4 or 5 Oly 2100s and we've seen that one may take more saturated photos than the other, one may take better focused photos, one may take better greens, etc. etc. etc.

And again- thanks for sharing your action :-)--Olympus 3O4O and Olympus 21OOUZ http://www.pbase.com/ro2001
 
Roberta,

Just a hunch - what's your firmware number? Mine is 73. I wonder if the firmware could have changed the saturation level?

Spannie
Roberta said:
Spannie said:
It is interesting that you comment that your camera's saturation
appears to be on the high side. I don't think I have seen a single
image from mine (that was correctly exposed) taken in soft mode,
that was not slightly undersaturated. Can it be differences in
personal preferences, or monitor calibration? Or do our cameras
handle saturation differently? Interesting!?!?
Click to expand...
I would say yes to all.
I do think that many people don't realize there is enormous
variation from one camera to another even within same models.
Often I hear people complain that their cameras aren't focusing
well or their colors aren't quite right and want to know what
they're doing wrong. Although it certainly isn't the only
possibility one should consider that the camera itself may be at
fault. I know that I've returned my first 3040 and my first 2100-
both times the second ones took better photos. My friend Pat, who
posts here, has been through 4 or 5 Oly 2100s and we've seen that
one may take more saturated photos than the other, one may take
better focused photos, one may take better greens, etc. etc. etc.

And again- thanks for sharing your action :-)
--
Olympus 3O4O and Olympus 21OOUZ
http://www.pbase.com/ro2001
Click to expand...
--Spannie
 
Spannie... I want to offer my thanks as well. I copied your sample and cut the unedited left side and ran it through your steps in Elements. I got the indentical results. I have copied your instructions and will try this on some of my photos.

Have you developed a "fake" action that we can use in Elements?

I learning something new everyday. Thanks.

--Bob 'MacTarheel'Olympus CAMEDIA C-2100 Ultra Zoom http://www.pbase.com/mactarheel/galleries 'Proud to support pbase'
 
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