Black and white dynamic range problem - selective color change?

Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

I'm using XnView for general corrective stuff, but it doesn't do
anything like that unless there's a plugin somewhere. So for XP, is
this where Gimp comes in? Is there anything with less of a learning
curve?

Peabody wrote:
Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

Free trial of Photoshop, 30 days, Adobe.com.

--
john mcwilliams

On Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:21:14 -0600, Peabody
wrote:

Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

I'm using XnView for general corrective stuff, but it doesn't do
anything like that unless there's a plugin somewhere. So for XP, is
this where Gimp comes in? Is there anything with less of a learning
curve?


It's cheating to some extent, but you could download the free 14 day
trial of the Topaz "Remask" program. It's probably the simplest way
to do a knock-out with Photoshop. I don't know if it's compatible
with Gimp but it seems like it would be.

http://www.topazlabs.com/remask/

The problem that I see is that you would have to familiarize yourself
with program you've never used - Gimp or Photoshop - for one
photograph. Neither are easy programs to learn.

You wouldn't select by color, by the way. You'd make a selection of
the piano, knock out the background (walls) on a layer containing the
selection, have one layer with the piano and a second layer with
everything beneath that, and adjust each layer with Curves or Levels.
Pretty simple for an experienced Photoshop user.

If it's one photograph, you should consider paying someone who is good
with Photoshop to do the post-processing and give you back a .jpg.


--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

For free I would look at:

Paint.NET
http://www.getpaint.net/

PhotoFiltre
http://photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm

Cheers,
David

Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

BTW: are you shooting RAW?

David

Peabody wrote:
Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

I'm using XnView for general corrective stuff, but it doesn't do
anything like that unless there's a plugin somewhere. So for XP, is
this where Gimp comes in? Is there anything with less of a learning
curve?




I'd try HDR using enfuse.

BugBear

Peabody wrote:
Well, I don't mean B&W in that sense. I mean I'm trying to take a
picture of a black grand piano located in a fairly small room with
white walls, and when the piano looks good, the walls are blazing,
and you feel an urge to reach for sunglasses.

I'll try to solve this with lighting if I can, but I wondered if
there is FREE software that would let me approximately select areas
of the picture with the mouse, which the software would finish
selecting precisely based on color, and then let me change the
color, or at least the brightness, of the selected areas.

I'm using XnView for general corrective stuff, but it doesn't do
anything like that unless there's a plugin somewhere. So for XP, is
this where Gimp comes in? Is there anything with less of a learning
curve?

If your camera can produce a RAW image, then this is an easy job for a
RAW converter, and the RAW converter that came with the camera will
probably be the easiest to use for the job. You want to compress the
dynamic range between most of the darkness of the piano and most of
the lightness of the walls. This could be done globally by changing
the luminance translation curve, or locally by using some kind of
local dynamic range optimiser, if the RAW converter offers that.

There are some third party dynamic range converters that will
automatically try to do that for you on that kind of image, and will
often do quite a good job. For example Picasa's RAW converter (free
from Google) does that, and if that doesn't do enough, allows you to
tweak it a bit more with the shadow fill slider.

--
Chris Malcolm

"Peabody" wrote in message
...
Here's an example of what I'm dealing with, if anybody is
interested:

http://drop.io/peabody

If you have a tripod, taking two or three different exposures about an
f/stop apart might give you more images to play with and combine. Yes,
10-bit raw is hardly going to be better than JPEG, if at all, so I
wouldn't waste time with that.

Installing .NET should be straight-forward, just a download - a 2.7MB
starter or a 197MB full version. Hope you have a fast connection or a
friend with one. Make sure you install the correct version for Paint.NET.
Enjoy playing with the images.

Cheers,
David

On 2009-11-06 10:13:45 -0800, Peabody said:

Here's an example of what I'm dealing with, if anybody is
interested:

http://drop.io/peabody

I see a color cast in you example. That is probably related to white
balance. I know others have suggested shooting jpg only, however RAW
will give you the best opportunity to adjust the WB.

It will probably be worth your while to create a custom WB profile for
the lighting in that room.

Anyway, I downloaded your file and tried a couple of fixes, this being
the most satisfying to my eye.

In this case I used CS4 along with the onOne Phototools plug-in set and
applied a few of their filters to make some tweeks.

Here is an A-B comparison with your image on the left;
http://homepage.mac.com/lco/filechute/Comp-A-B.jpg


--
Regards,

Savageduck

Peabody wrote:
Here's an example of what I'm dealing with, if anybody is
interested:

http://drop.io/peabody

I'd say forget all the fancy processing tricks, and
study up on lighting.

You've got one major source of light, and hence have a
fairly deep shadow from it (there is also very clearly a
second source, otherwise the shadow would be absolutely
black, which it isn't). But the walls are being
illuminated just as much as the piano, simply because
that source of light is far away, and thus the distance to
the walls only slightly farther, percentage wise, than the
distance to the piano.

Use more lights. With soft light it makes little
difference how far they are from different objects, the
amount of light will be the same. With harsh point
sources of light that are very close (just out of the
camera's view) the piano can be nearly twice as close to
the light as the wall is.

And focused spotlights would also reduce illumination of
the walls, which along with the above would
significantly reduce the dynamic range of the scene.

It can also make the scene more interesting too, in
terms of tonal variations. Three or four small spot
lights on the piano, and one or two diffused sources for
fill and background, might make a much more interesting
piano.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)