Can Curves do this?

R
Posted By
ronviers
Mar 19, 2007
Views
1379
Replies
0
Status
Closed
Hi,
I made the adjustments to this flower by first masking for the petals, the stamen and the leaves. Then I converted the mode to Lab. Then above the petals I placed a new layer that contained only the L channel and set the blend mode to Multiply with an opacity setting to something random. Then above that layer (L layer) I place a duplicate of the original layer that contained the revealed parts with the blend mode set to Overlay and opacity set to something in the middle. Then I went back and forth between the opacity settings of the L multiply and the normal overlay layers until I got something that looks good. I then did this for the leaves and then for the petals.
My first question is; what is happening here? Why does this work? And second, can curves be used to get such excellent results?

To sum up, I am selectively multiplying the L channel back to the original then Overlaying the original on top of that.

You can see small versions here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ronviers/YellowMacro

Or you can download the before and after at the following links. They have been optimized for web viewing but they are still about 500KB each. The tiff is almost 400MB so it is impractical to email that using my setup.

http://lh4.google.com/image/ronviers/RfC1QChPdRI/AAAAAAAAAxQ /FW-EDMQG9H0/Big-yellow-flower_web-after.jpg?imgdl=1

http://lh4.google.com/image/ronviers/RfC0LChPdQI/AAAAAAAAAxI /C2trvq-PCtA/Big-yellow-flower_web-befor.jpg?imgdl=1

Thanks,
Ron

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