One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge-October 2022
At the car show
In my “review-these archive” for personal project “Street Photography” there was this photo from a car show eight years go. The original is rather underexposed and has distracting clutter, but I decided to re-process it for the project. I could not help myself and played with the image. Finally added the re-processed color version to the project and moved the rest to my “SPECIAL” folder. Maybe I would do a post about black-and-white options.
Then today I saw Cee’s entry for the “One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge-October 2022“. I was intrigued. The images I had played with immediately came to mind.
So here they are. Normally no amount of torture would get me to share a photo SOOTC – straight out of the camera – without any post-processing. But for this challenge I shallowed my pride and made a jpg conversion of the RAW image. Here it is:
As I said, it is underexposed and has extraneous elements around the sides. Although shot at ISO 200 there would be plenty of noise noticeable when the exposure is brought up. I opened the photo in the new Topaz Photo AI. This program does a good job in analyzing and correcting for noise and some other parameters. It aggressively reduced the noise but did not address the underexposure. I took the output image to PaintShop Pro 2023. That editor has a “Smart Photo Fix” feature (under Enhance Photo), which also use AI to suggest basic improvements. PSP immediately came up with a very usable image. I boosted the exposure a tad more. Then I did a crop and I had my photo for my project:
That powerful blue car just captures the viewer. I wondered what I could do with it in black-and-white. PaintShop Pro has a very nice tool, Effects – Photo Effects – Black and White Film – that allows modifying a color image with essentially an infinite variety of filtration.
Placing the dot anywhere in the color wheel instantly shows the resulting filtration. See the yellow arrow in the illustration here. That setting provides yellow filtration. The closer to the rim the narrower the color selection. In the center the conversion is color neutral. Here are two versions, with narrow blue, and narrow red. You can see how the colors are rendered differently. A really neat tool!
.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck
Two Cameras - Two Views 
I love car shows 😀 😀 Great photo 😀 😀
Fascinating effects with the different filters. I like how you made the car really pop out by turning it black.
Thank you, XingfuMama
I love how virtual color filters affect a B/W conversion.
Hey Tom, it is fascinating. I like playing with this tool.