The curse of contrast....

[chachu207]

Hi all, after a visit to the Newark Aviation Museum, I got back, and took a look at my pics. I edited a few that I thought were nice, but have got most rejected for either contrast or brightness. The real problem is with this one, and I would appreciate very much any help!

Here is the original:


Just for reference, here is one of my edits:

[Sam at MAN]

Decrease the contrast alittle bit so you dont get the 'shine' if you know what i mean.
Cheers

[B7772ADL]

Sam's right in a roundabout kind of way. The edit appears to have a milky sheen to it which you can get rid of with careful contrast adjustment.

[wwshack]

Watch out for the halo around the tail.
Trying to find out how old this one was with no luck, only it was de-registered in 1974 to Northbrook College, the Newark AM web site is next to useless.

[brianw999]

It looks like you may have been a little heavy handed with the Shadow/Highlight tool as well maybe ?

Here's my attempt if it helps.






Workflow in PS CS2 was....

.78 CCW rotation.
Crop to 1024 wide.

- Create background layer.

- Using levels
- Adjust left arrow on histogram to meet the left upwards curve.
- Apply white balance wand to white bar on upper fuselage, rear of cockpit.

- Using Shadow/Highlight.
- Shadow = 17%
- Highlight = 8%
- Midtone contrast = +10

- Using Brightness/Contrast.
- Brightness = +10
- Contrast = +10

- Using USM sharpening
- 10x passes at 50, 0.2, 0.

By now the sky will be horribly burned out so.......and be VERY careful....

- Using Polygonal Lasso
- Start at the left side of the horizon. Select the sky by tracing across the horizon and aircraft upper surface, up the frame, across and down to the start point.
- Hit "delete" to reveal the original sky beneath.

Magnify the image to 300% and CAREFULLY inspect the horizon and frame edges to ensure that you have revealed all of the original sky but not overlapped and created a dark line where you don't want one. If you look at the left horizon on the tree line you can see where I made an error and overlapped the top of the trees with the lasso tool.
Use the eraser tool to touch up areas that may have been missed. When working on the horizon and areas around the aircraft, make small adjustments and use Ctrl+Z to go back one step if you make a mistake.

- Finally, flatten the image and save as a .jpg

Hope this is of help.

Brian.

[chachu207]

Thanks very much for the tips, and unfortunately, because i'm a complete stinger, I use GIMP, which as far as I know doesnt have a shadow/highlight tool! Ill take everyones suggestions into account, so thank you again!