Replicate this Capture 1 result in PL?

[greenmorpher]

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/56244055

Ignore the discussion about sensors and sizes -- the essential thing is that the guy has an old RAW image, runs it through Capture 1, and gets the excellent result you see.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/56248736

His statement about what he did.

Cheers, Geoff

[photoken]

Piece of cake:

dpreview adjustments.jpg

What he did was to make separate adjustments to the "sky" area and to the rest of the image. This means that the only tricky part is blending the two adjustment areas.

So,

1. Use the Automatic Lasso with a soft edge of 4px to select the area above the dark hill line and add a Histogram adjustment layer, which will be automatically masked to that area.
2. Invert the mask and add another Histogram adjustment layer, which will now be automatically masked to the bottom of the image.
3. To blend these two Histogram adjustment layers, add a Gaussian blur adjustment layer as a child layer to each Histogram layer.

The actual image adjustments are quite simple -- start by using the Auto Correction mode for all channels in the Histogram dialogs, and adjust the gamma slider to suit.

The result will look ugly where the two Histogram adjustment layers overlap, and that's where those Gaussian blur child layers come into play. Experiment with the size and intensity settings to get a pleasing blend.

Finally, finish it off by applying a DeHaze filter at the top of the layer stack.

The layers look like this:

dpreview adjustments layers.png

[greenmorpher]

Interesting, Ken. Many thanks for the pointers. Wow! Phew!

Oddly, messing around with just the sky selected, I got a pretty good result with that part of the image just applying Automatic Correction!

Cheers, Geoff

[photoken]

Oddly, messing around with just the sky selected, I got a pretty good result with that part of the image just applying Automatic Correction!

Makes sense. The key is separating the "sky" from the rest of the image (and then blending the two adjusted areas). Then there's any number of ways to enhance each area....