Levels & Curves

I want to share my experience on post-processing a.k.a PP of digital images. As we all know, our eyes are the best imaging device one could have as it can capture almost all visible gamut and spectrum of colours, but a camera with all its might in digital technology is not able to reproduce what we see with our eyes. Perhaps, not as yet. While exposure, focus details and other light-technical capabilities can be manipulated by the camera sensor and their numerous lenses, an image that 'comes-out' from the camera would typically look like this

However, when a photographer shoots in RAW (digital negative) and PP for image enhancement using softwares like Photoshop, Capture NX, Aperture, etc, an image can be transformed closed to what our eyes can actually view (as per the scene in front of camera lenses). With a little bit of tweaking on colour casting and contrast through the process of level and curve adjustments, the image below is very possible to achieve...

As the final workflow, sharpening the entire image can be applied to enhance the details and clarity of an image as what one can see when they are 6/6 eye clarity index.

Hope i have sufficiently poisoned someone. Go buy Photoshop CS3 and an iMac 24" !!

cheers


Photoshop