Note: If anyone sees any mistakes in this or can explain something I missed, go for it! – j
Bob showed us his latest toy, called a Spyder Cube, which acts like an 18% grey card, but even better! It has a white section, an 18% grey section, a black section, an “ultra-black” section (black in the shade) and a silver ball for highlights. About $60 from Canada Computers. More info from the company: http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-cb-spydercube.php
SHARPENING:
Bob talked about different modes of sharpening. He explains that our cameras have 2 filters: an infrared and an anti-aliasing filter. The anti-aliasing filter blurs your photos right in the camera, which is why pictures often need sharpening to look best.
Just clicking on “Sharpen” in Photoshop can create some ugly noise. It also sharpens all the RGB channels separately. There are better ways!
Sharpening in LAB mode:
LAB has 3 channels: Lightness, a and b.
This mode mimics the human eye in that the a channel sees blue/yellow and the b channel sees blue/green.
Switch to LAB mode. Select Lightness channel. Select Sharpen Edges.
N.B.: You lose info when you change between modes, since every mode has its own “set” of available colours called a gamut.
High Pass sharpening:
Duplicate the background
Filter - other - high pass. Select how many pixels you want (we did 3) - ok.
Change the blend mode of the top layer to Overlay. From here, you can change the opacity. Since your sharpening is in a new layer, you can use a mask to erase bits that you don’t want sharpened.
You can also do LAB sharpening in combination with high pass sharpening.
Bob talked about unsharp mask and I don’t remember what he said. But there was something about radius and threshold and something else. (help?)
Bob also quickly demonstrated making a layer mask and copying a new background into a picture. This was a little too complicated to take detailed notes on. Next time, be there! :)
