MAD work

[Paul Stenquist]

Well that was fun. I completed the first MAD project. (I'm going to 
have a go at Lassie's blue nightmare as well, but I did the "official" 
project first :-)
First let me say that I tend to work in baby steps. Some PhotoShop 
operations do approximately the same thing as others. Some of the new 
ones, like shadows and highlights, seem to be shortcut ways of 
combining several applications. So while I went through a lot of steps 
in processing this scan, a top notch retoucher might have done it in 
far fewer. But by working slowly and taking small steps, I can 
sometimes avoid big mistakes. Here's what I did using PhotoShop CS:

First, I went to "Adjust Levels" in order to view the histogram. The 
histogram showed this to be a good exposure with some high contrast 
elements. The shape was normal but there were "cliffs" at both the 
black end and the highlight end of the histogram. I clipped these, 
limiting the scale to about 6 and 250.

Second step was the Shadows/Highlights tool. I reduced shadows by *% 
and highlights by 11%. (This is an example of what I call the shortcut 
operations in the new PhotoShop. You could probably do this using 
several of the older tools, but it would be more difficult.)

Third, and after considerable debate, I decided to rotate the image 1 
degree clockwise. At first I decided that the small spruce tree in the 
foreground was the true vertical and that the image was fine as is. But 
I just didn't like the way it looked. So I said "the hell with it" and 
rotated. I then cropped to straighten everything out. I decided to 
eliminate the large tree on the left and the deep foreground shadows. I 
don't miss them.

Fourth, I increased the overall saturation by +6. Just a tad more color.

Fifth: brigness and contrast. I reduced brightness by about 15 and 
contrast by 7.

Sixth, I got out the dodge tool and dodged the shadow area on the 
shadowed part of the wood. I set it at about 10% and used a big brush.

Seventh, I decided to fill that big black hole with a bit of 
vegetation. I used the lasso to copy some shrubs that were a bit 
removed from the hole, taking only part of each shrub so the shape 
would be different. I then flattened the image and picked up a couple 
other pieces with the clone tool.

Eighth and final step: a bit of sharpening. I went with Unsharp Mask at 
50%, 1 pixel radius, and a threshold level of 9. And that's it. You can 
see the original image at:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2188154
My tweak is at:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2188158