Just Post (process). How to Make Your Bad Pictures Even Worse!

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The Dorkroom > Just Post (process). How to Make Your Bad Pictures Even Worse!

Swelinde: Feb 16, 2011

Myrmidongs posted:

I have no idea if I'm literally the last person to have learned this, but I just found out about an interesting phenomenon with curves adjustments. This happens in both Photoshop, and Lightroom, as well as some other programs I have tried that have Curves adjustments as well as layer blending modes.

Take a look at these two. Notice how the top one has more saturation? The curves adjustment on the top image uses the Normal (or default) blending mode. The curves adjustment on the bottom bottom image uses the Luminance blending mode. The curve itself is the exact same in both images and no other changes have been made between the two.

I'm going to quote from one of Adobe's blog pages here on their blending modes.

And also another page here on how Curves works

Basically all the literature you are going to come across greatly implies that using Curves only effects the Luminance values, but you can clearly see that it also effects the saturation while using Normal blending mode. I've not actually found any reason why that is the case.

I also want to say, I'm not trying to call out one or the other as being superior to the other. It's more of just an interesting thing that may trip you up if you are trying to preserve the saturation of your image and you've applied a curves adjustment and now it seems out of whack but you can't put your finger on it.

Feel free to run this experiment yourself.

Found a cool YouTube vid with the solution for that today, was called "horizontal curves".

This should do what you want, add contrast without touching the colours.
Unless I misunderstood, but then it's still a useful thing to know.

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Swelinde: Feb 16, 2011

Phanatic posted:

What the hell is going on here with Lightroom Classic CC?

Here's what shows up in the Develop module:

Here's what shows up in the Library module:

And when I export from the Develop module, I get this:

Why is the Library render so different from the Develop render, and why is final output different from either? I don't recall LR 6.0 ever doing this.

From some googling I found 2 possible fixes.

One said that the develop module in LR uses a variant of ProPhotoRGB and the Library Module is displaying the previews which are AdobeRGB. To fix it you need to create a hardware created Monitor Profile. Using a Spyder or a similar device.

You can see if this is the issue by setting the monitor profile to sRGB, if this fixes it you know you have a broken monitor profile.

Someone else suggested unticking Graphics Processor here:
Edit > Preferences > Performance > Graphics Processor

And on an unrelated note, I really miss the Maps section in LR 6, finally when I had some spare time and wanted to spend it sorting and organising my library I need to buy Lightroom CC to be able to use Maps at all

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 22:50

Swelinde: Feb 16, 2011

SMERSH Mouth posted:

Try as I might, I can't seem to get the kind of 'clean warmth' in all my digital night shot highlights, especially that HDR composite. I wish there was (or I knew of) an adjustment that does something like Hue/Saturation but only applies it to warm or cool highlights/shadows/midtones... the idea being that one could easily e.g. make warm highlights cooler while not making cool highlights turn neon blue. The way I'm doing it right now, it seems like my HDR composite results either look crunchy and over-processed or like stills from an unprocessed video shot with a log gamma profile.

Could you do a Hue/Sat adjustment layer and add a luminosity mask to it so it only affects the highlights?
You could pick the warm tones or the cool tones and just have them affect the tones in the highlights of the photo.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2020 20:24

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