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	I'm so full of crap right now. Lots of small things on my mind and a few big things. I want to get some of the smaller things out. The tools in Photoshop have rather specific uses. Some of them are obvious and some of them are not so obvious. And then you have to deal with how the tools actually work. For example, you can use Levels to add contrast to a photograph. If your highs are a bit low, off to Levels to stretch that data to brighten it up and add some contrast. Another use for Levels is colour balance. Easily done with the gamma sliders in Levels. One of the things about using Levels for colour balance is the axis upon which you are shifting the colours. If you wiggle the Red gamma slider, you are adjusting colour balance between red and cyan. If you wiggle one gamma slider, you will move colour balance between R/C, Y/B, or G/M. What if you want to adjust colour balance with Levels, but you want to betweeen RY and CM? Well, you would have to wiggle more than one gamma slider and get them to coordinate to get the variable axis that you want. Unless you are Uber, and I'm not when it comes to this, can very well lead to a lot of back-and-forth between channels in Levels. Bah! Just shift the data, tweak, and unshift the data. - Hue/Sat Adjustment Layer using Hue -30 - one top of that, another H/S using Hue +30 - toss Levels Ad-Layer between, and just use the R gamma slider With that, you can adjust the colour balance between RY and CM with just one gamma slider. Simple, yet snazzy. Coo coo ca choo. Another place where I've used this basic idea is with exploding data. Explode the data, tweak, and unexplode the data. Shift it big, tweak, then unshift it back down to small. Let's say I want to use Curves to tweak the range 100-150. Well, that's not much room to move in Curves dialog for that short range. I'll grab the range, explode it to 0-255, tweak away using full Curves dialog, and then bring it back down to 100-150. It's a bit much, but sometimes uber fine-tuning the subtleties can be good. Not that I'm that kind of freak, mind you. Okay, maybe on the rare occassion I am, but generally I'm not. Just a simple parlour trick that may come in handy. But it's up to you to spot when to use it. I only gave two quick examples, but there are plenty more possible applications out there. On with another parlour trick. One thing I absolutely abhore is the recommendation to use Channel Mixer to greyscale RGB. Bah! Leave greyscaling to better methods and leave CM to mixing channels. One fine day I was messing with making things fractal. Things like Mosaic and Cellular. I kept thinking about mixing the various levels of data when it comes to fractal things. Data? Isn't a channel nothing more than data? Why not toss the data that I want to mix into Channel Mixer and let that do the mixing for me? Now there is a grand thought for ya. Channel Mixer doesn't have to be limited to RGB of a photograph. After all, you can cut-n-paste any channel you want into the, uh, channels. Does the R channel have to be the red of an image? Certaintly not. It could very well be Lum. Does G have to be green? No. It could be Lightness. Could be Average(RGB), Max(RGB), Min(RGB), Gauss, High Pass, and so on. Not a completely infallable idea, but a fun one to play with. There is a great deal more to Channel Mixer. Not just the good, but the bad. Maybe one of these days I'll tell y'all about it. Loading...
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