Resources - Photoshop plug-ins

The workflow example

This tutorial is designed to give the users the idea of what's possible to achieve with our plug-ins and the proper sequence of tools used in the post-processing of the image.

Let's start by opening the image we wish to post-process. As you can see the image is exposed for the sky, rendering the plane too dark and featureless. Let's see if we can improve this image.

Let's make a initial brightness adjustment using built-in curves command (located in menu Image / Adjustments/ Curves)

And the result:

Well, the sky is brighter, as expected, but the plane is still too dark. Let's load the Shadow Control filter by going to menu Filter / Chroma / Shadow Control.
Click on 'Mask' radio-button and adjust the 'Separation' slider until you have a dark silhouette of the plane against a white sky. As you can see, the slider 'separates' the dark areas from the bright ones. This is our mask.

Click on the 'Result' radio button and adjust 'Gamma' and 'Contrast' sliders until you get desired brightness adjustment. The 'Gamma' slider makes the brightness adjustment and 'Contrast' slider accentuates the local difference in brightness to bring out the details.
Click 'Ok' button.

Here's the result. Note that brightness of the sky didn't change. The plane now looks great against the sky. The small details on the wings are now visible. Also note the pilot in the cockpit!

Let's have a closer look. Here's the result zoomed in 100%.

But, the image is a little soft. And, bringing the details out of the shadows has increased the noise. The amount of the noise will depend on the lot of factors, such as type of the camera, ISO sensitivity, amount of light and so on, but it will always be there. Running the built-in sharpening filters will only make the noise worse. We need a way to sharpen the areas that have useful detail, leaving the noise unaffected. That's where the Smart Sharpen plug-in comes in handy. Let's start it by going to menu Filter / Chroma / Smart Sharpen.

Just like Shadow Control, Smart Sharpen also uses mask. But unlike Shadow Control where mask was based on the brightness of the image, Smart Sharpen uses mask based on the detail in the image. Click on 'Mask' radio button and move the 'Mask' slider up and down to give you the idea what's happening. Moving the slider up will add detail into the mask and moving it down will reduce the detail. The idea is to create the mask that has the most amount of detail, but areas that are featureless (like sky, part of the wing on the plane) are not included.

Now, click on the 'Result' radio button and adjust the sharpness to the desired level. Remember to look at the areas of the image that were marked white in the mask view because only those areas will be affected by sharpening. Click 'Ok'.

Here's the result. The difference is subtle, but clearly visible. Note the edges, which are now more defined. Also note that amount of the noise hasn't increased at all.

Here's the image before the sharpening :

This is what we got so far:

Technically, the image is perfect. But it's a little boring. That can be changed by using the Photographic Filters plug-in (menu Filter / Chroma Software / Photographic Filters).

Select nice dark blue color by clicking the top portion of the 'Color' preview, set the hardness to a minimum, strength about .34 and add a little angle (17 deg). This creates a subtle graduated effect with sky darkening as it moves up, just as in real life. But, since we added a little tilt to the effect, it looks as a plane is in the middle of doing acrobatics!

Here's the final result.

Or, with a just a couple of mouse-clicks:

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