Tales of Two Cities

What is this thing called L-A-B?

High on my Christmas wish list was Dan Margulis' book Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace.  Some of the folks on Digital Grin, a photo forum that I frequent, have been working through the chapters in the book.  Just reading their posts made it clear that harnessing the power of L-A-B is a difficult challenge, if a rewarding one. I became intrigued.  Never mind that the book is specifically written for Photoshop users and I use Corel's PhotoPaint 12, I wanted to see what all the excitement was about.   I wanted to see if I could figure out how to do the magic in PhotoPaint, which is in many ways as powerful as PhotoShop. 

My thoughtful daughter made sure the book was waiting for me under the Christmas tree and, since then, I have been reading and thinking and experimenting and reading and thinking some more.  There are 16 chapters.  I am on chapter 2.  I have been reading and re-reading chapters 1 and 2 then experimenting with some of my photos.  Slowly I am beginning to "get it."  My brain hurts.  I can't stop.  I think I'm going to have to buy PhotoShop.  I'm in L-A-B!

Click here to read about the history of L-A-B.  You will note a French connection. Mais bien sûr!

Sharper Images

Thanks to good friend Chris I have a new tool in my digital photo post-production arsenal - a program called Focus Magic.  It works for both motion blur and out of focus problems, is intuitively easy to use (though I suspect I have a lot to learn before I am able to use it to its full potential) and often does a much better job than the unsharp mask tool.

Above is a picture taken a few days ago of Emily and Seven, one of her family's three cats.  It is called  "What we have here is a failure to communicate..."  The background of the photo as taken was in sharp focus but Em and the cat were not.  My solution was to mask out the background and apply FM to the two critters.  They are still not as sharp as I would like, especially Em's face  (I think there was some motion as well as OOF blur) and I did push it a bit so there are some sharpening artifacts, but for a family snapshot, the result is not bad and much, much better than the original.  Also much better than I was able to do using unsharp mask.  I do love the picture.  Very Emily and very Seven. 

Click here for a link to pictures Chris took in St Petersburg this past summer.