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Hello Jim:
Never try to force your image to fit someone else's histogram. If your losing the fainter detail in the image try proceding in smaller steps. Instead of trying to darken the area all at once, use several techniques to slowly move the darker areas to a deeper shade of black. There's probably too much detail in the dark areas and their draging the fainter areas down with them. Start out by checking the numbers in the "Info" palette in Photoshop. It helps if you have the "First Color Readout" set to "Actual Color" and the "Second Color Readout" set to CMYK these can be set in the "Palette Options". CMYK is great for letting you know who much black is going to be reproduced in the "blacks" usually if the K percentage is around 95% you'll have a nice black, if it's around 50-60% you'll have a nice grey. Find out where your fine detail is on the scale and then in curves set an anchor point around that spot (it helps to increase the grid pattern, hold down the ALT key and click anywhere on the grid but not on the adjustment line to increase the grid pattern) if your happy with the look and numbers of the higher values then set a few more anchor points up the adjustment line so that when you adjust the curves only the darker areas are modified. You may find that a large change is to drastic, try modifying the dark areas just a little with curves. Then try a little adjustment with "Selective Color" (Image>Adjust>Selective Color). Switch to the "Blacks" and try inceasing the Percentage of Black. And finally, try converting the image to CMYK. The K channel (Black) is great for adjusting black level. When you go to Adjust the Curves, switch to the "Black" channel. I usually have the greyscale bars running with black on the left and white on the right, you might have yours set up differently, but grab the dot at the corner on the black end and slowly drag it straight along the bottom towards the white end. This increases the blacks as well. You might have to set anchor points to keep the fainter values from darkening. You might have to run through a couple times or try different variations, but this should help. Best of Luck Craig Michael Utter Jim Ives wrote: I know this may be basic processing procedure to some, but for me it seems to be a road block. The problem I'm having is when I make the basic levels adjustment so the histogram looks like the ones in Chuck Vaughn's example of proper processing, the background is still too light. Is there a way to darken the background with out 1)destroying the histogram and 2) maintaining the fainter detail in the image. In this case It's a 3 image stack of M81. It's a 2hr a 1hr 37min and a 50min blended in PW. When ever I get the background dark enough the fainter part of the spiral arms is obliterated. Can someone give me some pointers on this? I've identified it as one of my major processing downfalls. Thanks! Jim Ives |