Life Less Literary

For the last month or so, I’ve been devouring Dan Margulis books, firstly Photoshop Lab Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace and now Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction - 4th Edition. The guy writes like an angel. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of computer books I have read which have been so compelling they’re hard to put down, and these are two of them. And as I’ve read, my understanding of Photoshop (and colour, and printing, and half-a-dozen other related topics) has skyrocketed.

For a couple of years now I’ve been wanting to get to grips with the levels command, not understanding exactly what it represents and how I can use it to improve my pictures rather than ruin them. Margulis poo-poos this rather blunt instrument and dives straight in to doing everything with curves, something I’d been even more terrified of (so much so I only had to look at the curves dialog box and I’d break into a cold sweat). Well, I’m not quite there yet with curves (my theory is running far ahead of my practice) but at least I now know what they do, how they can (in theory at least) be put to good use, and I can knock together some only slightly hamfisted curves of my own.

I’ve also learnt plenty of thing I never knew existed or were important: more LAB colour voodoo than you could shake a skull-topped stick at, what GCR and UCR are and why I need to know, how to tame the Unsharp Mask filter, how to (and why to) correct colour by numbers rather than visually, plus a million different blending tricks. And it feels like the journey is just beginning.

Browsing through some old images, I came across my “snowball” photo from Todmorden, taken just under a year ago. It looked like a challenging picture to play with, so I did. I’m fairly pleased with the results, although there’s a couple of parts I’m not sure about (and it’s a real bugger to find the right unsharp mask to use on it). Anyway, here’s three versions, I’ll not say what they represent but I’d be interested to hear which you like most/middle/least and, if possible, any comments you have on them. I’ll publish further details of each in a few days.