Shadows and Highlights

I’ve always liked this photo, both because of its very flat depth of field and also because of the lighting – a special hue because of the rain and because, well, because, this is France (it’s not an accident that most Impressionist painting was done in France, with its nearly supernatural light).

But the slide (in this case Kodachrome II, which accounts for the wide aperture setting that produced the out of focus background) never seemed bright enough to me, despite the wet glow of the highlights.

But hats off to Photoshop CS3, with its sophisticated and automatic Shadow/Highlight tool:

Artistic License

If you been to Venice you know it is everything it is cracked up to be and more: historical, vivid, smelly, crowded, colorful, exotic, old, and most of all, romantic in the sense that just around the next corner is something wonderful you’ve never seen before but always imagined.

Such was the case in 1971 when my wife and I crossed one of the 100s of narrow bridges that lock together this storied city and espied this water taxi taking its Venetian occupants to their next destination. Lucky in timing, I caught the gondola as it moved out of the shadows of a narrow canal and into a sunlight water thoroughfare. Pictured below is what I saw.

But the next picture is what I imagined: with the filtering controls of Photoshop CS3, specifically the Pixelate>Pointilize tool, an “impressionist” rendering of Venice springs to life. Maybe this is not the picture I took, but it is the picture of my “mind’s eye” at that moment. Could Seurat or Monet have done any better?

Using the Color Balance Tool

When my wife and I drove from our home in Germany to the Brittany coast of France to visit the great sea cliffs of Etretat in 1971, I had Monet’s famous Impressionist painting of the same name in mind.

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The day was a drab one, wintry and blowing, but the salt laden air was mysterious with the glint from the storm wracked sky reflecting on the leaden waves and alabaster cliff faces. Maybe due to the limitations of my slide film, and maybe due to the passage of time, I never felt my pictures captured my intentions that day.

Enter Photoshop CS3.

In addition to the controls discussed in the post below, I also used the Color Balance feature (Image>Adjustments) to bring out the magenta tones in the highlights of the alabaster cliffs and the reflections of the evening sky on the waves, along with the cropping tool to strengthen the diagonal line of perspective, getting the result shown next.

And now look what the brightness control does:

Capturing What the Eye Saw

One of the limitations of low-light photography is that the eye/brain combination does a much better job of adjusting than does film or even today’s computerized digital cameras.

Below you will see the original version of a photograph I took in the hugely romantic border-town of Bitche, France, in 1971. Walking the cobblestoned streets in the late evening searching for red wine and fine dining, I looked up in time to see a French “gendarme” peddling by on his nightly rounds. The picture was taken on Ektachrome 200 slide film, with a TTL metered Nikon F2 Photomic that despite its advances still relied on good reflexes to match the exposure controls and operate the focus. I felt lucky, upon viewing the slide, to catch the motion of the bicyclist and the glow of the lights from within the café. But I was extremely disappointed with the general “muddiness” of the picture.

Enter Photoshop CS3.

The next image, a screen capture, shows the controls I used to produce a new version of this picture, one that captures in its true form the image that I saw in my mind when I took this picture.