The evolution of one photograph, from negative scan to final digital file (page 2)
On page one, I showed that I selected the bottom portion of this photograph and made levels and contrast adjustments in order to get the tones I wanted for the stone. The full photo, as it appears after that step, is below.
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This photograph is a relatively simple example in terms of making the masking selections. Some photographs can be much more complex and difficult to mask in a way that the tonal adjustments do not become obvious, by leaving halos, or lines that make the changes in tones much too abrupt and obvious.
With this photo, I simply inverted my selection of the bottom half, and after making a minor adjustment to exclude the concrete that seperates the stone from the railing, I was ready to go. I excluded the concrete part in this step because the adjustments I was making to the brightness and contrast of the image would have certainly blown out the highlights in the concrete, which was very light in the negative, although it did retain detail. I knew at this stage that the concrete part would have to be treated seperately from the top and bottom of the image if I wanted it to retain that detail in my final print.
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After once again using adjustment layers to tweak the contrast and brightness in the top half of the photo, I now have this ...
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The final step is to darken the concrete part I mentioned earlier. It's just too bright. Because I excluded it from all of the manipulations I've made so far, there is still a lot of detail in that part of the image, and I just want to darken it down a little bit.
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Once that step is completed, I have my final image ready for printing. Once again, because I have done all of these changes in layers, I have a large layered Photoshop® file which can be a slow pain to work with, but I have kept all of my options open for future printing. If I am later printing on a paper that doesn't seem to hold highlight detail as well as the paper I last printed on, I can go in to the adjustment layers and make tweaks to the highlights specifically for that paper. All without destroying any of the valuable pixel data.
So, for comparison, here once again is the original scan followed by the final image.
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