Uncle AJ's Rolex, Wrist Watch & Nature Forum A place to chill out and have some fun a forum about nothing yet also about everything. An alternative wrist watch and nature forum.
Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 6:11 pm Post subject: A quick tutorial on how to fix an overexposed dial
If you are anything like me, quite often you end up with soft, milky dials that look nothing like they are supposed to. I encounter this A LOT every time I photograph a watch that does not have AR coating. (Rolex and Speedy Pro mainly :( )
Hopefully this tutorial will help you fix this problem through digital post processing.
Remember: while this makes it a lot better, it does not replace a good, well photographed subject.
So:
First off, let's take a look at the image. Pre and post processing. I picked a picture I took a few months ago with my point and shoot Canon G2.
Big difference... huh?
I can't stress this enough: Since my donor picture was far from perfect, the final result will not be perfect either. The better the donor, better the result!
1. Let's start by opening the picture in Photoshop. In this tutorial I am using Photoshop CS, but I made sure to not use anything not found in version 6 or 7.
2. As I am sure you noticed, my picture is kinda flat, my black is not really black, white is not really white. Everything is also a bit too... yellow. And that... is a result of improper exposure and white balance for the most part.
First thing you ALWAYS want to do with a digital picture is to check out your "Levels". Never use the AutoLevel feature as it is almost always wrong.
The image below will show you how to get the the level adjustment.
3. As you can see in my screen shot below, my levels are all over the place!!! Look carefully and you will see three little arrows/triangles along the "x" axis. A Black one on the left, a gray one in the middle, and a white one on the right.
The black and white triangle represent your darkest and lightest point in your image, with the gray triangle being the median. Those triangles/arrows are supposed to be located at the left and right edges of the graph, with the gray arrow in the middle.
My image is nothing like that! What that means is that my black is not really black and that my white is not really white.
4. Let's go ahead and fix that! Simply move the arrows/triangles toward the edges of the graph, then move the gray one in the middle. (cause that's where any self respecting 50% gray ought to hang out) As a side note, keep in mind that you do not have to be dead on at the edge of the graph. Try to stay as close as possible while maintaining a pleasing image, like illustrated below.
5. Much better! Now that we took care of the color level and balance, let's attempt to remove some of that yellow caused by my improper white balance settings. One of my previous tutorials described how to take care of color tint in an image, so I won't go into step by step descriptions. Just follow the screen shots.
6. Slightly better now. Since my original pic was pretty yellow, it will be difficult to remove all the tint without doing severe damage to the picture. We'll leave some on there for now, and we can always apply one final fine tune at the end.
Time to take care of that dial now! For most of us, the dial plays a huge importance in the selection of a watch, and there is nothing that bugs me more than taking a picture just to realize that all the lovely dial detail and perfect color has gone down the drain!!
What we will do now is remove that reflection by fooling the computer! And we will use the levels adjustment for that.
We all know that the EXP II dial is black. Unfortunatelly... not in my pic. Plus my bad angle shows off a lot of reflection off that dial.
What we need to do first, is to select the troubled area: in our case, the dial.
There are several ways in which you can do that. You can hand draw around the dial, or you can be lazy like me and just use the elliptical tool as shown below.
Tip: if you hold down the shift key while making your ellipse, it will make a perfect circle.
7. Why am I selecting just the dial? I want to correct just that part of the image, while leaving the rest untouched.
Now that I have selected my dial with the ellipse tool, let's go back to the Almighty levels again and take a look.
8. :( :( No wonder my dial isn't black!!! All that reflection drove my color balance crazy!! There is NOTHING on that chart where black is supposed to be!!
So how do we fix that? Simple. Just like we did it a few steps ago: by moving my left slider (black) to wards the edge of the graph and the gray marker in the middle until I see a pleasing result.
I'm gonna leave the whites alone.
And that's about it!!!
Now my Rolex (while still being a tad over exposed and a bit yellow) has a black dial again!
All you have to do now is save your image, apply the Sharpen filter and resize it to your liking so you can display it on your favorite forum. :-)
Let's take a look at the Before and After pic one more time.
Joined: 05 Aug 2007 Posts: 1803 Location: Work, Saudi Arabia..Home Bolton, England
Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 9:37 am Post subject:
By trial and error I have found out that by right clicking on the cirle, you can "feather" the size by 0 to 250 pixals at a time and that by left clicking and holding, you can move the circle around. :shock:
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