My Image Your View - ** Long Beach Island **
Oct 29, 2023 23:39:39 #
This was taken a couple of years ago at Long Beach Island here in NJ. This is SOOC and I worked on it so I know it has some good bones. I purposely tried to pick a photo that needed a lot of work. So lets see what can be done with this photo.
Feel free to download this image to your computer. Then you can edit it any way that you think is an improvement. Composites, black and white conversions, textures, sky swaps, inverted images, solarization, or whatever else you think will improve the photo are acceptable techniques for your edit. When you are finished, post your edit in this thread. Edits will be accepted until 9pm Eastern time on Thursday. No edits will be accepted after that time because we will begin voting then. Thank you for your efforts and your participation.
Feel free to download this image to your computer. Then you can edit it any way that you think is an improvement. Composites, black and white conversions, textures, sky swaps, inverted images, solarization, or whatever else you think will improve the photo are acceptable techniques for your edit. When you are finished, post your edit in this thread. Edits will be accepted until 9pm Eastern time on Thursday. No edits will be accepted after that time because we will begin voting then. Thank you for your efforts and your participation.
Oct 30, 2023 13:48:54 #
Oct 30, 2023 17:49:40 #
This was interesting. I opened the image in Photoshop and started worked on it. The picture, as you can see, is very dark. When I brightened it, it bitmapped a bunch, thought I wasn't going to be able to improve it at all. I remembered I have a version of DXO. Tried it with DXO and was surprised to see a major improvement. Saved the improved image then reopened in Photoshop to make the rest of my changes.
Oct 30, 2023 22:25:39 #
NJFrank wrote:
This was taken a couple of years ago at Long Beach... (show quote)
It's all about the red sunset colors in the sky.
Oct 31, 2023 15:03:03 #
I really struggled with this one. But I did want some of the detail that was hiding in the water. And that band of brightness was really distracting, so I tried to take it down a bit without losing the colour.
Oct 31, 2023 16:12:33 #
The entries so far, I think handled this image rather well. I posted it knowing it needed to be worked on. Glad to see people picking up the challenge.
Oct 31, 2023 18:25:41 #
Jim-Pops wrote:
This was interesting. I opened the image in Photoshop and started worked on it. The picture, as you can see, is very dark. When I brightened it, it bitmapped a bunch, thought I wasn't going to be able to improve it at all. I remembered I have a version of DXO. Tried it with DXO and was surprised to see a major improvement. Saved the improved image then reopened in Photoshop to make the rest of my changes.
Wow. I didn’t even concentrate on the blocking that was occurring in the image. I did know that everything but the sky was in very deep shadow. Other than the sky, most of the image is within the 20 darkest bits out of a possible 256. So the shadows are definitely blocked up, resulting in heavy pixelation as you brighten the image. So I went back and tried to see if the pixelation could be eliminated or significantly reduced.
The first thing I did was to convert the image from 8-bit to 16 bits, but I’m not sure if that actually made a difference.
Then I tried a two step process of blurring the image with a gaussian blur, then re-sharpening (Topaz Lens Blur model). That didn’t work, pixelation was too great for the blur. To eliminate the pixelation, the blur needed was way too much for the sharpening model to have any real effect.
Then I tried PS’s neural filters. Here are the steps I used to get the results below. While not perfect, It did significantly reduce the pixelation and keep much of the image details as shown below (viewed at 200%).
1) brightened the image to the desired level
2) Ran the JPEG Artifacts Removal filter. This took about two minutes to process on my machine (MBP M2 Max, 64GB) so it would take a while on an older machine. This removed some of the blocking but resulted in a slightly blurry image when viewed at 200%.
3) Ran the deJPEG’d image through the Photo Restoration filter, reducing all NR to 0, but setting 'Color Noise Reduction' and 'Half-toning artifacts reduction' to 50. This removed a lot of the blocking that I was trying to get rid of with blurring but without loosing a lot of detail.
4) Final step was to run the image back thru Topaz Sharpening using the lens blur model,
Oct 31, 2023 18:40:35 #
Oct 31, 2023 21:11:32 #
NJFrank wrote:
The steps you took on my shot are way above my pay grade. Kodos to you.
Just sharing a technique that I tried for (partially) solving the pixelation problem. This is PS specific. Topaz Photo AI can be replaced with almost any other sharpening method. There are probably many other solutions, but I let Adobe's AI to do the heavy lifting. Just sharing to help someone else if they come across this problem in the future.
Oct 31, 2023 21:49:06 #
SalvageDiver wrote:
Just sharing a technique that I tried for (partially) solving the pixelation problem. This is PS specific. Topaz Photo AI can be replaced with almost any other sharpening method. There are probably many other solutions, but I let Adobe's AI to do the heavy lifting. Just sharing to help someone else if they come across this problem in the future.
Oct 31, 2023 22:15:02 #
Thank you SalvageDiver. I will go through your steps tomorrow. I think you did a great job with what we had. On my image, I placed a texture layer over the fencing and blended to hide, some not all, of the bitmapping.
Nov 2, 2023 13:44:32 #
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