Here's another example of how you can use Focus Photoeditor for any
task and any kind of picture, even those ones that came out of
camera..well.. not really well to say the least. Below is a picture
taken on a nice sunset, almost in the evening. I wanted to capture
the light, together with the atmosphere of the people moving around
me. I especially liked that in front of me some very young bikers
were happily running their small vehicles together with their
mother. Unfortunately the settings I had my camera on in that moment
were not the right ones, sothe resulting picture was very
under-exposed:
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| Before |
After |
In the original picture, If your monitor is well calibrated, you
should hardly be able to see the bikers. The only part of the
picture which is sufficiently exposed is the skyline of the
buildings in the background and the sky itself.
How worst the original shot could possibly be to benefit from this
image editor's capabilities?. I loaded the picture in the editor and
I pressed the "Quick Fix" button. This is what I got:
"Ok I said!" now I can see three bikers,presumibly the mother and
two children. The shadow has been opened. So I tried another of my
favorite automatic corrections: the "Auto-White Balance" to
bring the picture more on the bright side, pushing the gray sky
towards the white.
I then used the curves tool, to bring some more light in the
mid-tones and shadows, without changing the overall contrast.
Now I finally got the picture with the right brightness and
contrast:
Time to look at the color now. Can you notice a bluish cast in the
picture? Time to remove it. With the mouse I right-clicked on one of
those white-bluish areas and selected the "remove cast" command.
I also applied some sharpening with the Auto-sharpen command.
Now that I was happy enough with global corrections, I thought the
photo would benefit from removing that man on the left (marked with
a red circle in the picture below) which came into my shot (like a
thief almost:) in the last moment. I thought it would be quite
easy by cloning part of the wall behind him.
After cloning the man out of the photo I was quite happy.
The sky was looking still a bit too much whitish though, and some of
the atmosphere in the original picture was missing.
So I selected with the Work Area Tool the upper part of the sky and
restored the original background on a new layer (from the Edit
Menu).
I then cropped the new layer to the area that I had defined using
the work area tool, so to leave only the sky.
Now I needed to blend the sky smoothly, so I selected the layer of
the sky and the command Edit Alpha Channel, I selected "Transparence
Gradient" and created a vertical gradient with black on the top and
white on the bottom. I applied the gradient and after a few more
tweaks with curves this is the final result
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