Thanks Bruce, Godfrey, Mark etc., I pretty much went with Bruce's suggestions, as they seemed the easiest, and set up a preset in lightroom to take just the blue channel and then process it in B&W, with Bruce's suggestions for tweaking the noise reduction. For fun, I also back converted them to color.
The results are below: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157631149650198/ I'm sure that with more work, I could bring a little more out, possibly by keeping all the data but just twiddling with the noise reduction sliders after converting to B&W. On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:51 AM, Bruce Walker wrote: > On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Aug 19, 2012, at 6:07 PM, Bruce Walker wrote: >> >>> Hey, a Blue Man Group cover band! :-) >>> >>> That looks like a challenge. I'm game. How about posting a .dng on DropBox? >> >> I made a small lightroom catalog with the raw files (.pef) and posted it in >> a hidden directory on red4est.com >> >> If you want to give it a try, ping me, and I'll email you the url. >> >> The .pefs are still uploading, and will take quite a while, I expect. > > Larry, I've had a chance to play with one PEF (8698.PEF) and here's > what I found. > > The extreme contrast between levels in the RGB channels appears to > freak out Lr. A few functions don't work like they should at all (eg > using the eye-dropper to detect points in the tone curve: total fail). > It also freaks out the Noise Reduction algorithms so they botch the > image by posterizing it. > > But I got a decent, albeit grainy, b&w rendition. Try this: > > Start with all controls at their Lr defaults. > Your detail-over-smoothing problem is solved by reducing the "Detail: > Noise Reduction: Color" to zero (it defaults to 25). Do that first. > Lens Corrections: Enable Profile Corrections: on > HSL/Color/B&W: Black&White Mix: > - 1st set all sliders to -100 > - set Blue to +88 > - set Purple to about -63 (adjust to balance shadows and noise) > Tone Curve: Lights: -40, Darks: +40 > Basic: Shadows: +69 > > The image should look pretty good now. No noise reduction at all, so > it's quite grainy. > > > If I was going to do a really proper job, I'd set all the Lr controls > to their defaults, set Color NR to zero, then send the the image to > Photoshop to edit. There I'd extract the blue channel and chuck the > others (copy-all in the B channel in Channels, then paste to a new > layer). After that play with curves and apply some NR with a plugin. > > Or else, after extracting the Blue channel in Ps, just save the image > back to Lr and use the Luminance NR and tone curves there. Set the > Detail slider up to 80 or so when raising the NR. > > Cheers! > -- > -bmw > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
