RAW Challenge! Steven Teitelbaum's Central Park New York M8 Pictures 2006

[Asher Kelman]

I am delighted to post for Steven Teitelbaum several pictures of his recent shoot in New York.



We start today with Central Park. This one one of New York's most romantic places to visit. In the fall, the tall New York Skyline is reflected between autumn leaves floating in the water. Paths are lined with yellows and gold.

I have selected a few that caught my eye and Steven kindly gave OPF limited use consent for you to process his RAW files to the best of your ability and post the results here. You can use any RAW processor. We hope to learn from you something of the reserve and robustness of these files.






These compressed JPG images shown here ARE NOT FOR DOWLOAD! The files are obtainable by sending me a PM with you name and your level of experience and RAW processor and I will send them to you. If this goes well, many more files will be made available.

You can optimize them any way you like in color or B&W. You can, if you wish add film grain, if that what you like to do. All images must be posted only here and should have © Steven Teitelbaum 2006 on one edge. Your Title and concepts should be succinctly given so we can correlate variants with intents!

Thank Steven for being so generous. We hope for some very interesting images as a result!

Have fun!

Asher

[Fabio Riccardi]

Hello everybody,

I loved these images, autumn in NY has such gorgeous colors!

I wanted these colors to pop out, so I used an RGB ZoneMapper to boos the contrast in the foliage tonal range, which will also increase the color saturarion (reds and yellows!). This is the same trick photographers used to play with slide film: underexpose the shot increases saturation...

I also used the ToneMapper on the skyscrapers image, to have a more dramatic sky and open up the shadows.

But I wanted even more pop, so I used a trick that I recently learned from one of our own forums contributor and I adedd a Sharpen layer with large radius and with Soft Light blending mode, looks beautiful to me.

For the curious, LZN files are attached too.

Regards,

- Fabio







http://homepage.mac.com/fabio.riccardi/L1000174.lzn
http://homepage.mac.com/fabio.riccardi/L1000179.lzn
http://homepage.mac.com/fabio.riccardi/L1000193.lzn

[Asher Kelman]

Wonderful intepretation Fabio!

The colors, saturated as they are, add an extraordinary rich style and seem to me to provide a more personal encapsualting presence than the Adobe RAW "as is" images I posted. Mine by comparison look somewhat more open and a larger space!

The richness of colors is more better realized in your first image. The clouds have more 3 dimensionality from the way LightZone has handled the hues and tones in the clouds and brought out the subtle beauty.

I might have an issue perhaps with the skin tone of the people in the middle image, but it is likely that you din't deal with this separately.

Otherwise this is a new experience for me and I thank you!

Have you also considered a B&W, toned or untoned? That would be a special place where LZ should be king!

Kind wishes and appreciation,

Asher

BTW, you should provide titles, since htis is your intepretation! This way we might understand how the paths of related creativity works!

[Antonio Correia]

First of all I would like to ask if Steven Teitelbaum is the person refered in http://www.drteitelbaum.com/index.html ?

The images are easy to treat. (As if I was a great expert and master of the thing... :)
The images on the left are JPG from the original files un-treated. I use PSC, the RAW converter from PS CS2.
All I have done:
1. Change to LAB
2. Apply curves and make adjustments
3. Unsharp Mask in Lighness channel
4. Crop
5. Stroke
6. Canvas
7. Copyright
8. Save As JPG 12

On the 1.st photo I made 2 shots: one for the background and another for the reflection,
They were then melted after a mask.

On the 2.ed photo I corrected the yellow overcast.

On the 3.ed photo I cloned the bench

In all of them I have cropped with my own size 30*20
They are in my site here

[Antonio Correia]

First of all I would like to ask if Steven Teitelbaum is the person refered in http://www.drteitelbaum.com/index.html ?

The images are easy to treat. (As if I was a great expert and master of the thing... :)
The images on the left are JPG from the original files un-treated. I use PSC, the RAW converter from PS CS2.
All I have done:
1. Change to LAB
2. Apply curves and make adjustments
3. Unsharp Mask in Lighness channel
4. Crop
5. Stroke
6. Canvas
7. Copyright
8. Save As JPG 12

On the 1.st photo I made 2 shots: one for the background and another for the reflection,
They were then melted after a mask.

On the 2.ed photo I corrected the yellow overcast.

On the 3.ed photo I cloned the bench

In all of them I have cropped with my own size 30*20
They are in my site here

[John Kuo]

Here's my version, done in C1 Pro using Jamie Robert's M8 profile, WB as shot, convert to TIFF and then resize/sharpen in Photoshop CS2.

[Don Lashier]

Here's a couple "all in C1" versions. Taken into PS only to resize, add copyright and border. Composition was good so I didn't crop. These are fairly straightforward so I won't title. Skipped the third because it doesn't strike me. The first has a double-hump histo screaming for dual or even triples so I'll do that later. Had a hard time keeping the clouds while bringing out the foreground and sacrificed contrast on the buildings to do this. AWB seems to be weakness, cooled both images slightly. Tonality (DR) is great, lots to work with.





- DL

[James Roberts]

Hi Don--great to see you here!

Thanks for mentioning the tonality / DR of the M8 files. I've been "multiple exposing" files here till the cows come home, and it really is exceptionally good, even compared with my 1ds2 standard :)

You're right--that first shot screams for at least three C1 develops. I don't know if you've tried LightZone, but I like its ability to work independently with selections; I'm afraid my prowess with it though renders the results a little artificial looking still (not so good feathering the selections, and I usually want to avoid a lot of mid-tone colour shifts when compositing... and I don't know how to do that with LightZone yet).

[scott kirkpatrick]

I cooled this to 5000 and the leaves came back to realistic. used "film extra shadow" and generic M8 profile (of 3.7.6) since the exposure looked good. Lowered exposure a bit, increased cc and cs (whatever they mean) by my usual amount, turned color noise reduction off (default is halfway across the slider!). That's all. It looks more real to me now.



scott

edit: the file may change to meet specifications (800 px high instead of wide, copyright overwritten), but not tonight. This will make several following comments a little obscure, but they remain useful.

[Don Lashier]

Hi Scott,

Nice version, but you forgot the copyright. Also, I don't know about others, but I find it a lot easier to compare if all are uniform size (ala original post, 800px max).

- DL