Red Umbrellas on Rose Street

The polish

With the colour pop finished, there’s still a need to do something about that washed out sky.

First select the sky by using the wand tool – a tolerance of about 20 should do the trick. Despite looking completely white, there is actually a little texture here, and we can bring this out by using the Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast control. Reduce the brightness until you’re happy there’s some feeling there, -15 is about right.

The feeling overall is still that of a rainy day – a little dark and gloomy. We can brighten up the rest. Use "Edit > Invert Selection" to select everything but the sky, then bring up the same brightness/contrast control again. Increase the brightness this time until those umbrellas are a bright apple red rather than a sombre crimson.

I find that increasing the contrast often gives a nice boost to the feel of my selective colour shots. In this case we won’t touch it though – contrast is already quite strong off the camera.

Finally, the photo feels a little tall, drawing attention away from the subject. I’ve chosen to crop it down from the top a little, which I think helps the umbrellas grab the eye and lead it down the lane.

The summary

This tutorial has covered basic usage of tintii, introducing the simplest and most commonly used controls. The final result is the rescue of an ordinary photo into something special – a moody black and white with the striking red of table umbrellas.

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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.