Reply To: Camera Upgrade Question

[cameraclicker]

I think the “looks a little blown out ” effect is from the change in white balance.  I used her left thigh just below the mid line as a white reference.  I also tried the moulding to her right but thought the first reference gave better results.  Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) has clipped and blown out indicators, which I used to guide the use of the Recovery slider to get the blown out areas slightly darker.  If you are working from a raw file, you can recover lots of detail, JPEG files have very little data so manipulation is not as effective.  The levelling tool in ACR needs less steps than in Photoshop so I adjusted level while it was open there.  Once it moved to Photoshop, I removed the vertical line at the right side and the horizontal line where seat meets wall.  I liked her skin tone better before the white balance change, so once almost everything else was done, I put the original back as a layer and just masked in the skin.  Finally I added sharpening for the legs and took some away from the rest of the image with the blur tool which removed detail/pixelation from the coloured part of the wall and took some emphasis off the moulding.  I’m delighted you like it.

The clover photo had the hand and clover sharpened to bring out the detail while the rest of the image was left about as it was.

There is a filter in most cameras that reduces sharpness to avoid moire patterns, and as you reduce image size you loose sharpness, so the final step should be sharpening, but too much sharpening leaves a bright line or halo around darker objects so too much sharpening is bad too.