Newbie to PSP

[babypink]

Oh gosh, where do I start,its a bit of a minefield what with learning photography AND PSP its hard work.

Anyhow, I have a photo which I took the other day (see below) and I like it very much accept the chestnut part of the horse is not as rich in colour as I wished or rather it has not come through on the photo, how can I enhance that part only?

http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/a...terandTony.jpg

Thanks

[soenda]

Welcome to the forum, Babypink. I was in your position about a year and a half ago. I agree with you that it's a tall order learning digital photography and photo processing at the same time, but it's very rewarding. You can see the progress you're making every step along the way. Plus, the good folks here on the TalkGraphics PSP forum are wonderful resources. They've helped rescue me from several muddles along the way.

You didn't mention which version of PSP you're working with, and the program does change as the numbers go up. I've opted to stay with PaintShop Pro 9, myself. I took a go at your photo, first checking the histogram adjustment tool. I reach that under Adjustment on PSP's top bar, then the sub menu Brightness and Contrast, then clicking "histogram adjustment" about halfway down the sub-sub menu. Or, you can simply use the keyboard command Control+Shift+H.

The histogram showed me that your shot is not utilizing the full distribution of available color. There are many darks and brights excluded. You see this in the narrowness of the curve on the histogram. By using the sliders underneath the histogram, I could easily put the colors in place. I moved the right-hand slider right, and the left-hand slider left. In response, the photo instantly became richer and brighter. Not only the chestnut color but all the colors seemed markedly improved. Then I pushed the middle slider back and forth a bit until it looked the best to me, but that's always a personal thing.

Now, I didn't do what you specifically asked for, which was how to enrich the chestnut color alone. That's not hard to do either, but involves making selections of just those parts of the photo you want to change. For that you can use the Magic Wand tool, which is on the vertical tool bar on the left. It's a little more involved, though. Please let me know if you would still like to pursue going that route.

Good luck; if you stick with, you're going to have a ball.

[bshand1]

Anyhow, I have a photo which I took the other day (see below) and I like it very much accept the chestnut part of the horse is not as rich in colour as I wished or rather it has not come through on the photo, how can I enhance that part only?

hi babypink

There are a number of ways you can tackle this.

1. before you do anything though, you might check your colour management. [file][colour management][colour management]. The way a photo appears on your screen will vary considerably on how this is set. It's complicated! Set both values to sRGB and start there.

2. You can select the chestnut parts of the horse using freehand selection tool. if it takes more than 30 seconds to make the selection, save it! [selections][load/save selection][save selection to disk]. Then if you screw it up (I do, often ...) you can always reload the selection.

Once you have the sections made choose, say, [adjust][hue/saturation] or press Shift-H and you can play with the settings there to get what you like.

3. What I usually do is create another blank raster layer right click on the background layer in the layer palette and select 'new raster layer' and then set the blend mode to overlay and the opacity to 50% (for a beginning, you can change these values later). Click OK.

Select the eyedropper (press E) and find a nice brown in the chestnut part of Pointer the press B to get a paint brush and paint the brown over the chestnut parts. You will have to play with the brush settings (size, hardness etc) to get what you want probably.

If the over paint is too dark try reducing the opacity or vice-versa. You can try other bend modes too, such as hue, multiply or soft light.

Just have fun experimenting

Hope this is some help.

Brett