GIMP image sharpening
Discussion
Whilst messing about with some long exposure shots I got one or two that I thought would be passable. Unfortunately the foreground interest was slightly out of shot (as you can see below.) I've been using Raw Therapee to convert from .CR2 to .TIFF and spent awhile messing about with GIMP trying to get the tree looking sharp enough but without ruining the background. After using unsharp mask unsuccessfully a few times (both with a threshold of 0 and later 2) I thought that the sharpen tool tip approach might work as I could just go by hand over the branches but it just doesn't seem to do anything, regardless of the amount applied.
Is the below beyond repair or is there something I can do? (And yes, I will be cropping the window frame out.)
Is the below beyond repair or is there something I can do? (And yes, I will be cropping the window frame out.)
Fair enough. That photo has been abandoned but I'm slowly learning how useful editing software can be and think I need to get to grips with it. Are programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop essential in order to get results or are free programs like GIMP and Rawtherapee worth looking at?
tenohfive said:
Fair enough. That photo has been abandoned but I'm slowly learning how useful editing software can be and think I need to get to grips with it. Are programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop essential in order to get results or are free programs like GIMP and Rawtherapee worth looking at?
I've not used GIMP or Rawtherapee much so don't know their exact feature set, but I'd imagine that getting used to them should yield decent results.I'd certainly take a look at some paid options as well though, you may find that a relatively inexpensive package might aid your progress (Photoshop elements is around £60)
There are demos of most software options of course, Adobe has a full range of them here - http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
tenohfive said:
Fair enough. That photo has been abandoned but I'm slowly learning how useful editing software can be and think I need to get to grips with it. Are programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop essential in order to get results or are free programs like GIMP and Rawtherapee worth looking at?
Unless you are a serious graphic designer, GIMP will do all you need.I'm slowly getting to grips with photo editing software. Very slowly. But I'm having a regular issue: whether I edit with Rawtherapee (which I'm coming to like) or GIMP the output file looks different when opened normally (through W7 photo viewer) to how it looks in either Rawtherapee or GIMP. I've used the former to create a JPG, the colours come out as they did prior to editing (changing contrast and saturation.) I then tried a TIFF output. That comes out unedited, but when I open that TIFF in GIMP it shows how I edited it. When I saved that file as a JPG again it shows unedited in W7.
Any ideas why?
ETA:
I'm sure there's something very basic I'm missing here, as I've just uploaded the JPEG to Flickr and it does include my edits.
Any ideas why?
ETA:
I'm sure there's something very basic I'm missing here, as I've just uploaded the JPEG to Flickr and it does include my edits.
Edited by tenohfive on Friday 10th February 16:36
tenohfive said:
I'm slowly getting to grips with photo editing software. Very slowly. But I'm having a regular issue: whether I edit with Rawtherapee (which I'm coming to like) or GIMP the output file looks different when opened normally (through W7 photo viewer) to how it looks in either Rawtherapee or GIMP. I've used the former to create a JPG, the colours come out as they did prior to editing (changing contrast and saturation.) I then tried a TIFF output. That comes out unedited, but when I open that TIFF in GIMP it shows how I edited it. When I saved that file as a JPG again it shows unedited in W7.
Any ideas why?
ETA:
I'm sure there's something very basic I'm missing here, as I've just uploaded the JPEG to Flickr and it does include my edits.
I don't know the applications you are using but they are likely to be working in a simialr way to others.Any ideas why?
ETA:
I'm sure there's something very basic I'm missing here, as I've just uploaded the JPEG to Flickr and it does include my edits.
Edited by tenohfive on Friday 10th February 16:36
RAW files have an embedded jpg 'thumbnail'. When you first view a RAW file prior to any editing this is what you normally see as it's fast to display.
When you edit the raw will be interpreted by the program's RAW converter from scratch and may well look different to the camera 'style' settings produced internal jpg.
In my workfow I will convert and edit the files and save the edits (as per the way the software works). Depending ion the application the edit information files may or may not contain their own jpg thumbnails of the file as edited. Creating a final size jpg is usually and 'export' process at which point the exported file will contain additional information like colour space used and other things that may well be different to the original out of camera jpg.
Win 7 seems notably poor for some reason at re-presenting jpgs in Explorer and its related tools. In fact it seems to be worse these days than I remember it and I'm not sure why that should be. It's not, afaik, colour managed and may be adversely affected by mismatches with whatever is going on in your graphics card and drivers. If the jpg's colour space is not sRGB is may well look odd. Sometimes very odd.
Even if you have not actually edited any colour information specifically other changes, notable saturation, can have an effect. If you have not checked how well your screen is set up that too may produce unexpected large variations from what appear to be small changes at the point of edit. (Most editors will be colour aware and showing you what they believe to be accurate colours although they mostly have no way of knowing whether the graphics card/screen actually present things correctly.
If you are using TIFF intermediate files they will likely also have embedded jpg thumbnails where the edits have been applied and which contain other display processing information that will seem OK viewed though a colour aware package (probably) but maybe not so good via other methods.
At the risk of plunging you into a very deep deep end of the pool it may be worth reading up on colour calibration to see if it gives you a handle on what may be happening. There are several bite sized tutorials at www.cambridgeincolour.com that can help with getting some understanding of what it's all about.
Of course you may already know something about this and what you are seeing could be something entirely different ... but we have to start somewhere ....
I ended up buying PS Elements 10 since it was cheap. One thing I've spent the last hour trying to do without result is trying to work out how I can turn the picture almost monochrome, but leave one colour in (yellow in this case.) I've seen various guides that show how to do it with layers and brush but I've got isolated blobs of colour that are difficult to pick out once it's monochrome (small flowers on a bush.)
I gather in PS there's a way of doing it by adjusting the colour balance and effectively turning down each colour individually except the one you want. I can't work out how to do this in Elements though. Does anyone know if this can be done?
I gather in PS there's a way of doing it by adjusting the colour balance and effectively turning down each colour individually except the one you want. I can't work out how to do this in Elements though. Does anyone know if this can be done?
PS10 - I stand to be corrected, but can't see it. Full Fat PS and LR have a set of sliders on a saturation adjustment - I think that's what you mean.
Still think the best (if you HAVE to do spot colour
- 
) is Duplicate Layer, desaturate top layer, paint/erase through, colour returns where you paint, merge layers, post on PH, we can all laugh...... 
Still think the best (if you HAVE to do spot colour
- ) is Duplicate Layer, desaturate top layer, paint/erase through, colour returns where you paint, merge layers, post on PH, we can all laugh...... That technique works but it's very time consuming - 6 or 7 small yellow flowers on a bush snow covered bush which itself only occupies about 1/5 of the picture means it's tricky to pick out the individual flowers once in black and white.
Edited by tenohfive on Thursday 16th February 17:54
Layer masks are your friend
Unfortunately whilst that works really well for an isolated flower, for something like what I'm working on it's a real pain to have to zoom in on the individual image and flick between a full colour version and the monochrome work in progress to try and work out where the flowers are - as once in monochrome it's very difficult to see where the flowers start and snow ends.
There must be a way of isolating one colour, surely?
There must be a way of isolating one colour, surely?
K12beano said:
Use "Magic Extractor", under image, to automate your selections???
(other than that I'll leave it to an expert..........)
Doesn't seem to work, although there is a strong possibility that's user error.(other than that I'll leave it to an expert..........)
Simpo Two said:
Colour picker might be worth a prod.
Assuming I'm doing it right, when I've set the foreground colour to a similar shade of yellow and paint over it brings out all the colours. Again I suspect there's some user error here.tenohfive said:
K12beano said:
Use "Magic Extractor", under image, to automate your selections???
(other than that I'll leave it to an expert..........)
Doesn't seem to work, although there is a strong possibility that's user error.(other than that I'll leave it to an expert..........)
Pixel Pusher said:
Op if you want to PM me the best res file you have and let me know what you need, I'll happily have a go for you tomorrow.
If we get a fix, I'll walk you through it, but I'll be doing it in CS4 rather than Elements.
Any help to you?
PP
That's a very kind offer but I'm more doing it for experimentation's sake - the more I play about with Elements the more likely I am to learn a few bit's that'll come in handy when I need them. And I've just found out that the technique I talked about earlier was in Paintshop Pro - not Photoshop. From lot's of googling I don't think what I was talking about can be done in Elements.If we get a fix, I'll walk you through it, but I'll be doing it in CS4 rather than Elements.
Any help to you?
PP
I'll sit down later with an adjustment layer and brush and see how it comes out. Cheers for the help though.
Gassing Station | Photography & Video | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff