selectively bringing up shadows

Timothy Devick

• 2020年06月05日 16:37
• 編集済み

I'm using C1 v11 and need some help selectively bringing up shadows in an image.

I have landscape images, mostly jpg but some raw, that were taken in the middle of the day with trees that have strong shadows on the branches. This results in the trees essentially being silhouetted. Some of these photos were taken in early spring when flowers are  blooming but not all trees have leafed out yet.

I can bring up the shadows on the tree branches and trunks if I mask them all and then increase shadows and  brightness. This is effective but it is incredibly tedious to mask out each branch of the trees. 

I tried going to the Curves tool and picking the Curve Point from the shadows on the branches and then adjusting the curve for that point but the result looks very strange - it seems to brighten the shadows without making more detail visible. It makes brighter, less contrasty blacks. I don't have much experience using the Curves tool so maybe I'm not using it right or effectively?

I also tried using the Levels tool and moving the top end of the bar representing the darkest shadows to the right some but it lightened everything in my picture. I don't have much experience using this tool either so, again, I might not be doing something right.

Is there an easier way of bringing up the darkest shadows without masking every single branch of every single tree in an image like this?

0

• 

  OddS.

  • 2020年06月05日 17:58

  Layer with a luma range mask?

  0
• 

  Timothy Devick

  • 2020年06月05日 20:19

  That would still require a mask over the tree branches wouldn't it?

   

  0
• 

  Ian Wilson

  Moderator

  • 2020年06月05日 21:28

  

  Apart from anything else, Luma ranges were only introduced with Capture One 12, so that is no use to Timothy as he is still using Capture One 11.

  However you probably don't need to mask the branches very accurately anyway, if you are going to use the shadows adjustment on them, as long as they are a lot darker than the sky behind them. Have you tried a rough mask over the branches, and then just he shadows adjustment?

  But as OddS suggests this would be a good use for a luma range, and you might like to consider whether to upgrade from version 11. There is an example in one of Paul Reiffer's recent online tutorials where he does a similar thing with a tree silhouetted against the background, but it does use a luma range. See this video https://youtu.be/uRG2lMkPtJs from about 11:30 to 15:30. He's actually trying to silhouette the tree if I remember but you'll see how he masks it easily using a lunar range.

  Ian

  0
• 

  Timothy Devick

  • 2020年06月06日 05:06

  Thanks! I will watch the video and see if the technique could help me.

  I am pretty wary of upgrading. C1 is incredibly buggy and, judging from the comments I've seen on the internet about C1 v20 release, their quality is getting worse not better.

  0

投稿コメントは受け付けていません。