Red Umbrellas on Rose Street

The tidy

tintii has a few tools for tidying up, available via the Postprocessing pane; Photoshop provides numerous others and we’ll get to them in the next section. Firstly, note that our subject, the umbrellas, are a very saturated red, as is often the case with selective colour photography. The Sat decay slider, Sat for Saturation, let’s us threshold the intensity of popped colours. The higher this setting, the greater the intensity required of a colour to avoid it being greyed out. Try increasing the slider toward the half way mark to eliminate some extraneous colour. Make sure you don’t lose any of the umbrellas or flowers at this stage though! Zooming in can be handy to ensure there’s no grey creeping into the brollies – use the zoom controls in the toolbar at the top.

Sat edge may be used to soften the harshness of the saturation decay thresholding effect. It’s particularly useful for popping objects with edges that aren’t well defined – hair, light effects, gradients and the like, and we won’t need it here. After the thumbnails, you’ll find yourself using the saturation decay tools most.

The Hue decay and Hue edge pair are similar, but threshold the purity of colours, or their closeness to the selected thumbnails. Hue decay has more limited use than saturation decay, but is in your back pocket for some tricky pops.

The channel mixer pane can be used to adjust the balance of the red, green and blue channels that go into making the greyscale portions of the image. This can be useful to lighten or darken background areas based on colour.

We’re done with tintii for now. Click the OK button and the effect will be applied to the photo. We’ll now use some of Photoshop’s other tools to finish up. Note that in Photoshop you can use the Filter – Last filter (or it may be Filter – tintii in your version) to reapply tintii to the same image, or other images, with the same settings. This is useful for batch processing. You can also use tintii with the actions and recording palette.

While Photoshop has a number of tools that we can use for tidying up, we’ll use a desaturation brush here. Select the brush tool from the tool palette, as on the right. Once selected, set the brush mode (at the top of the screen) to Saturation, and increase the size to give yourself a nice fat brush. Now, simply paint over the remaining areas of colour that you wish to be black and white. While tintii may leave some colour pixels that you don’t want, these are often well separated from the subject, and easily removed with a coarse once-over like this.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 21:57 and is filed under photography, tintii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.