Separating/'lifting' dark from light in an image in Pro X6

[joelwhyte]

Hello

Am a very recent purchaser of Pro X6, and was wondering the best way to separate or 'lift' the darker areas of an image from lighter areas. I have attached an image as an example. Ideally, I'd like to separate entirely everything in the image that is yellow, from everything that is not. Can this be done?

Thanks in advance.

Joel

[Grazie]

That's a real tuff one.

G

[Joelle]

Hello

Am a very recent purchaser of Pro X6, and was wondering the best way to separate or 'lift' the darker areas of an image from lighter areas. I have attached an image as an example. Ideally, I'd like to separate entirely everything in the image that is yellow, from everything that is not. Can this be done?

Thanks in advance.

Joel

If by 'lifting' you mean you want to make the dark areas lighter, the Fill Light/Clarity tool will do that.
Experiment with the settings.
If you want to separate the yellow from the black: Promote the background layer of the image (right-click in the Layers Palette and Select Promote Background layer)
Select All - Ctrl + A -
Selections>Modify>Select Color Range, use the attached settings.
Hit Delete to remove the black, or Invert the Selection - Selection>Invert and remove the yellow

I hope that's what you meant

Joëlle

[Grazie]

I'm with Joëlle on this.

Initially I thought about selection and separation,; getting hold of the "blacks" and lifting separately, but didn't have the understanding on how to achieve this - thanks Joëlle. But having now tried it and realising that this would then introduce areas of transparency because the colour selection would necessitate the removal of "grades" of grey and what appears to be mono-tonal "yellow", this in turn gave holes in the image - not good.

Thinking as a video maker and content creator, which I am, I popped the image into SONY Vegas and applied the Computer RGB to Studio RGB. This gave the following results - apologies for the 16x9 plate:

So, Layer separation brings "other" issues; using X6 adjusting levels will make everything brighter and not selectable and swapping Levels produced similar results (see above), I'm left thinking that you'd need to get back to the initial image creation/creator, if that's you, then have a word with yourself(!), and try to separate prior to the production of the JPEG and deal with each layer then.

OR, stay with Joëlle's idea and just use "Lift".

Bottom line here is that I think that the Yellow is so pervasive within the grey/mono-tonal blacks that attempting to de-construct this is a real challenge. What appears to be a construction from a Photo or Still grab from a video has then had Text added and then rendered to a JPEG. Somewhere along that workflow you'd have the opportunity to "Lift" those contrasty Blacks. Maybe here, with a final JPEG in X6 is not the place to do it. I'm guessing what you're happiest with what is attainable and available. IMO? I quite like the look already! It's dark and broody and full of dramatic intent.

Interesting . . . .

G

[photodrawken]

the best way to separate or 'lift' the darker areas of an image from lighter areas.

It's very easy, and quite simple:
1. Use Adjust...Color...Channel Mixer with the default settings to convert the image to black & white.
2. In the Layers palette, double-click on the image layer to convert it from a "Background" layer into a normal layer.
3. Add a new raster layer and move this layer below the image layer.
4. Fill that new raster layer with whatever colour (or gradient, or ??) you want.
5. Change the blending mode of the B&W image layer to "Multiply".

The result:

The layers:

Image1 layers.png (5.5 KiB) Viewed 5509 times

[hartpaul]

Lift the darker areas from the lighter yellow ones - sounds like a two tone separation to me. Have you tried Adjust> Brightness and Contrast > Threshold. This converts all parts of your image below a certain brightness to black and the rest to white. By adjusting this you could probably make a mask to get what you are after which is still unclear.
Do you want an image which just contains the darker areas with the rest transparent. Or justr the lighter areas and the rest transparent. Or what?
More detaisl please. If you have seen an idea you want to emulate then a link to that image or posting that image would help.

[Forriner]

Lift the darker areas from the lighter yellow ones - sounds like a two tone separation to me. Have you tried Adjust> Brightness and Contrast > Threshold. This converts all parts of your image below a certain brightness to black and the rest to white. By adjusting this you could probably make a mask to get what you are after which is still unclear.
Do you want an image which just contains the darker areas with the rest transparent. Or justr the lighter areas and the rest transparent. Or what?
More detaisl please. If you have seen an idea you want to emulate then a link to that image or posting that image would help.

Just to add a bit to that, you could make it an adjustment layer (Layers/new adjustment layer/threshold...) so you don't edit the image itself. If that works and you need a selection, use the magic wand, and check the 'use all layers' option and 'contiguous' if needed, activate the threshold layer to select only white or black. You can use that selection on the original image by activating that layer.

[Grazie]

Yup, get back to the original media and adjust. What we are doing here - IMO - is closing the door after the horse has bolted. You asked can this be done in X6. IMO, no.

Sorry

Grazie

[Joelle]

The OP hasn't come back, so we don't really know what he is after.
Guessing is 'good' , it forces users to explore the program

Maybe we should wait before declaring this 'impossible', most things are possible.
It just takes a bit of work.'

Joëlle

[Grazie]

My post was neither meant as a criticism of X6 nor our combined attempts to arrive at a good result by exploring different approaches. What this Thread could demonstrate is that without the pixels we aren't going to get that which we want: Increasing the Darks and retain the saturation of the Yellow, by some factor by grabbing Tonal-Grey Pixels.

My point (IMO) is that there isn't the digital information available. Unless X6 can make-good that which isn't there, no matter what we do, trying to reach back and grab information=pixels that don't exist, then this is a forlorn hope/exercise.

OK, acknowledging this, I have now done some further work. I've found that the BLUE component is all but gone, it's non-existent; I can't swap or Mix the RED and GREEN Channels to the BLUE channel to boost the greys to increase their Levels. I've done this when I've White Balanced both Stills and Video of SCUBA video by analysing Channel-by-Channel and using the Channel Mixer. Anyway, no joy.

Now, if somebody can put forward a way to transfer some of the GREEN and RED Channel to the BLUE Channel and thereby boost the Darks, I can't see "a lift" happening. Please go ahead and try.

As I said previously, it would be good to get at the original media?

Cheers

Grazie

[photodrawken]

My point (IMO) is that there isn't the digital information available. Unless X6 can make-good that which isn't there, no matter what we do, trying to reach back and grab information=pixels that don't exist, then this is a forlorn hope/exercise.

Wrong.

I've already shown how to quickly and simply do that for the blacks, as black.

There's a slightly different method which eeeeasily "separates" the original blacks and allows their colour to be changed at will:

[Grazie]

Yes I saw what you did and I had achieved this prior to you posting. Now, fit it all together and make those DARKS less dark while retaining the Saturation of the YELLOW. If you can garner any pixels from the gloom to brighten with the YELLOWs still in the range, I really want to see.

Always willing to learn.

Cheers

Grazie

[Forriner]

Maybe Grazie should start a thread instead of hijacking joelwhytes, even though the latter seems to have lost interest?

[hartpaul]

I found the statement "best way to separate or 'lift' the darker areas of an image from lighter areas".
It would appear that some have taken this as meaning get more detail in the darker areas.
I took it as to separate - have the darker areas on their own , remove all the yellow areas as if to make a transfer or black and white transfer on a tshirt.
Would be nice if the original poster would come back and confirm.
Still it is only about 3 days since the original post, perhaps not really important or they have changed their mind.

[photodrawken]

Yes I saw what you did and I had achieved this prior to you posting.

That's highly doubtful.

Now, fit it all together and make those DARKS less dark while retaining the Saturation of the YELLOW. If you can garner any pixels from the gloom to brighten with the YELLOWs still in the range, I really want to see.

That certainly wasn't part of the original request, but I suggest you RTFM and use the Color Picker and Layer opacity setting:

print on coloured stock 01 lightened.png (104.27 KiB) Viewed 5364 times

The Help file also explains adjusting the brightness and contrast of images....