Complex Tutorial: Postcard |
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• | I thought you said the weather was good... Where's the sun? |
• | I can't really see your face, it's too dark. Next time use a flash. |
• | Bad composition - the ski in the foreground is somewhat annoying. |
• | Was it really a skitour, or did you actually use the lift? |
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Even though there are several approaches to adding sunlight, I found that the most flexible result can be achieved in the Curves > Levels panel. You can also try the Exposure Correction tools in addition to this.The idea is to stretch the histogram, in order to get more contrast in the high tones. For this you should move the 255 to about 240, and then press .from |
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Next, you might want to remove the blue stain resulting from a faulty white balance in the camera, which often happens in snowy environments.Using the Automatic White Balance of CodedColor turns out to be too radical, so open the Color > Color Cast panel and use the to select a stained snow area, which will then be "cleaned" to a shade of white and gray. |
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This feature is very innovative, as it automatically detects the underexposed areas in the image and brightens them up, leaving everything else untouched.In the Exposure > Smart Flash panel, move the to about half the scale, and press . You will notice, that the person in the image lights up as if you had used a flash on location. |
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Now comes the fun part where you can be somewhat more creative, much like an artist touching up a painting.Open the Clone Brush tool, select a of about 30 and a of about 75, then press the button and click on a snowy part of the image next to the ski. Then just paint over the ski, replacing it with snow.You can select several different source points, in order to make the result more realistic. If you are unsatisfied, press thebutton and try again. You will need some practice with this, as the coming clone task is a little more difficult. |
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The ski lift runs through the whole image, and you will need a steady hand in order to remove it without a trace.To start of, undo the zoom with the Clone Brush, but this time select a much smaller of about 10 and an even smaller . Now in the snow above the cable, then slowly paint over the cable from left to right.button, and pan to the left part of the image. Again, open theIf you need more practice, then start with the fence at the bottom of the image, which you might also want to remove.Once you get to the lift station behind the person, you may also need the Eraser brush and the Retouch Blur tool, in order to correct some mistakes and soften the borders.Note, that the Eraser brush undoes all changes to the image, including the exposure corrections at the beginning of the tutorial. So you might want to save the image under a different name prior to any cloning, in order to clear the undo memory.Once you're done with the removeal of unwanted objects, you might touch up some of the cloned areas showing obvious texture redundance, again using the clone and retouch brushes. |
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Finally, we come to the most dramatic improvement to the original image, where we will replace the rainclouds with a sunny sky.For this, we need to find another image close to the same size, with the sky we would have liked to have on that overcast skiing day. Load this image in the Fill Tool panel.We then move the 15, click on the and then in the sky above the mountain. We will immediately see the gray sky area filled with our source image.to about
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Since the sky will probably spill over the mountain, there are 3 measures we can take:
For best results, you can combine any of these measures.
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Footnote: All photos were shot with a Pentax Optio digital camera with 5 million pixels. The flash and exposure modes were set to fully automatic. No camera internal correction was applied, and the output format of the images was JPEG (not RAW). While the autofocus rendered mostly sharp images, different color and exposure errors occurred. The digital improvements were all done with the CodedColor PhotoStudio image editor, but were also compared to Adobe PhotoShop, Paintshop Pro and Gimp. While these programs sometimes had more options, the results were not significantly better in quality, but often took longer to accomplish. Picasa and IrfanView were not included in this comparison - since the few editing tools provide even less options, they cannot be considered classic image editors.
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CodedColor PhotoStudio by 1STEIN is an award-winning Windows photo viewer and editor to organize, edit, resize, reformat, correct, compare, sort, watermark, annotate and print digital images, and to edit EXIF and IPTC data in digital photos. You can rename multiple images, remove scratches, stich panoramas, convert RAW photos (from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc. cameras), burn digital watermarks, correct colors, batch convert and correct images and generate a web album in HTML5. The software is easier to use than Photoshop, but more versatile than ACDSee, Picasa, Irfanview or Gimp. Many magazines consider it to be the Swiss Knife of Image Editing. Have a look at our Before / After tutorials to get an idea of the powerful capabilities. The software comes with a detailed handbook and a fast database to store EXIF/IPTC data and color information. CodedColor PhotoStudio is the ideal image editing tool for every-day and professional digital camera users. The user friendly interface combines features like expert photo editing & printing, layer editing, web album galleries, slide shows, photo management & cataloging, custom sorting, IPTC & EXIF editor, GPS tagging, perspective correction, barrel distortion, effects, thumbnail generation, resize & resample images, batch conversion, database keyword searching, red eye removal, color/sharpness/brightness & contrast correction, artifact removal, clone brush, scanner & TWAIN import, screen capture, lossless JPEG rotation, transparency (alpha channel) and layers, gamma correction, screen shows with many transition effects, watermark text, image annotations, panorama stitch & animation, video capture, PDF album export, photo layouts, collages, frames, shadows, histograms, automatic white balance, photo sharing, etc. Opens and converts all common image formats: BMP, WMF, GIF, JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, PCX, PNG, PSP, PSD, PCD, HEIC, HEIF, AVIF and all current RAW formats. The installation includes our the CodedColor Publisher, a versatile photo layout and DTP tool to create individual and rich photo books. |