Ramble: Masking with Equalize — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Ramble: Masking with Equalize

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Been awhile, hasn't it? Yeah, I've been pretty quiet this past while. Oh, the places I've been and the things I've seen. Quite a few things on my mind. Let's see if I can take you down one of my roads. Personally, I don't put a whole lot of stock into Histogram. It has it's uses, but I don't swear by it. But frequency has been on my mind an awful lot and it has led me back to Histogram. In particular, Equalize. There is a connection, and it has to do with what I call [i]the human touch[/i]. Since I want to talk about masking, how about a quick review? A mask a greyscale. That is what we want to end up with. The question is: what data set do we use to get greyscale? The answer, usually, is Luminosity. Why? Because of our eyeballs and because it usually the better data set. How do we get Lum? - copy photograph - Edit > Fill -- Using: Black, White, or 50% Grey -- Mode: Saturation Tada. Instant Lum channel. But you knew that already. From here, we want to divide the Lum into highs and lows. Most people would just use Levels or Curves. Maybe even Threshhold followed by Gauss. But we don't want to do that just yet. Why? Because we are after the [i]frequency[/i] of the [i]entire[/i] photograph as a [i]whole[/i]. Ah, that is a magical quandry. How do we get the general frequency of an entire photograph without the pit falls of frequency? I'm sure you are aware of the infamous halo quandry when using Gauss et al for masking. Maybe we can take care of both quandries in one fell swoop, eh? Sure can, and all it takes is Image > Adjust > Equalize. What you will be left with is the statical top half and statistical bottom half. - extract Lum - Equalize it - use it as a mask for your favorite techniques -- load it straight-up for highs -- invert to get lows I have used this on many washed-out photographs with very pleasing results. Even used simple variations to take care of stark and hard contrast. Let's just say that I'm very happy, and that doesn't happen very often. More to come. Loading...
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