One Photo Focus is a challenge hosted by Stacy at Visual Venturing, where we all make edits to the same photo and then we see what we have all come up with on the First Friday of the Month.  You can learn more about this challenge here.

This month’s image was provided by Helen Chen from HHC Blog.

Here is my submission…

And here is the before image…

Check out what everyone else came up with for this image here. 😀

GIMP¹ Tutorial

The past few weeks I have been playing with Luminosity Masks.  I first learned about them one day when I was reading a tutorial by Pat David.  I’ve created a few of my own tutorials on my take of this technique in my last few posts (Clarity in GIMP, Playing with Luminosity Masks).  I edited this image between those two posts.  Let’s look at my layers to figure out how I did it…

*** I used some of the same screenshots from previous posts because I did the same thing, and it saved me some time while creating this tutorial. ***

1. First, I brought up the RAW image in DarkTable³.  I made a few minor edits with exposure, contrast & brightness, I picked a black point in levels, and it looks like DarkTable is set to have a preset base curve determined by camera type.  **I’m new to DarkTable and am still figuring it out.**
2. Next, I played with Luminosity Masks and the Local Normalization filter (which I go into detail about in this post (step 3)).  Like I did with those previous two posts, I created 9 Luminosity channels by running the script mentioned in Pat David’s post [Filters->Generic->Luminosity Masks (saulgoode)] on the base image layer.
   
   Then I ran the G’MIC² plug-in filter Local Normalization [Filters->G’MIC->Details->Local Normalization] making sure to set my input/output to these parameters…I used the default settings (ignore the preview – this is the same screenshot from a previous post)…Then I made a duplicate of the Local Normalization layer 9 times and added a different channel mask [Layer->Mask->Add Layer Mask; selecting Channel] to each one… I ended up liking a combination of three of the layers with masks (channel L at 50% opacity, channel M at 50% opacity, and channel DDD at 100% opacity).

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   Once I decided which layers with masks I wanted, I made a new layer from visible [Layer->New from Visible].

3. I tried several ideas to make the white bits between the tree leaves blue, but ultimately I didn’t like an of the things I did.  Instead, I created a duplicate of the visible layer created in step 2, then I went to Hue-Saturation and played with color saturation [Colors->Hue-Saturation].  I wanted to amp up the red, and I altered the yellow and green too…
4. For some reason, I decided to just remove the blue (and cyan) and I ended up liking the result.  I made a duplicate of the hue-sat layer created in the last step [Layer->Duplicate Layer OR Shift+Ctrl+D OR ], then I went to Hue-Saturation again [Colors->Hue-Saturation] and removed the blue and the cyan completely…
5. Lastly, I created a curves layer and applied a mid-tone Luminosity Mask to it.  I made a duplicate of the hue-saturation layer created in the last step [Layer->Duplicate Layer OR Shift+Ctrl+D OR ], applied a Luminosity Mask [Layer->Mask->Add Layer Mask; selecting Channel M], then pushed the whites and the blacks in curves [Colors->Curves]…Creating my final image…At some point I played around with cropping the image, I thought I had decided not to crop, but it looks like I did take a bit off each of the sides.

Kind thoughts and comments are welcome!

Until next time…
~nic

¹ GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.

Like Wilber? You can get him here.

² G’MIC Plug-in for GIMP is a plug-in that has a ton of filters, you can download it here.

³ DarkTable is Open Source software that is available for Linux and Mac, it is a photo editor that does many of the things you can do in Lightroom, like process RAW files.  You can download it here.  The DarkTable online manual can be found here.