DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Yesterday’s image of a dirty solar panel was enhanced for dramatic effect. In the original shot, the “wash me” message was scarcely visible.

Photoshop provided the vehicle to my salvation. I’ve been using the program for more than 10 years, and except for those times I discover I’ve just blown an hour on a correction, I really enjoy using it. I’ve created a new debris.com channel for Photoshop trickery, to show off some of the things I’ve learned, and populated it with some past articles. There are more to come.

The challenge with the “wash me” image was to radically increase the contrast between the dusty surface of the solar panel and the ever-so-slightly darker surface where I’d wiped a message into the grit. But a simple application of Curves — normally enough to gain contrast — was insufficient.

After fifteen minutes of fiddling in Lab mode, I came up with a workable solution. I’d realized I needed to find the image channel with the highest existing contrast. There are 10 channels to every image (RGB, CMYK, Lab), so I checked them all. Cyan was the best.

I copied the cyan channel and pasted it back into the document as a new (grayscale) layer, twice. An aggressive curve correction to each brought out the contrast: one was optimized to show off the left third of the image, and the other for the middle. There was no saving the right third; the ‘H’ in ‘WASH’ is basically invisible in every channel.

These two correction layers were multiplied together, then applied to the background layer using Pin Light mode. A gradient mask was applied to the right two-thirds of the layer accentuating the left third of the image, so as not to blow out the extreme right side. I adjusted the opacity sliders to balance the blend of images, and followed up with a global curve correction to bring the colors back to reality.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. I knew I wanted to increase the contrast between two points that had not much space between them. I knew that “there are 10 channels to every image” from the color-correction bible. The rest I made up.

The result makes it look like we’d had a dust storm, which is not the case. But this was the image I saw in my mind when I snapped the picture.