Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
If you have been following along in our little tutorial series, welcome back. This time around, we have a very random photo. It is bland, but the lines are more or less straight. Mmm… think we can do something with this?
This is going to be a rather short / quick tutorial, as I want you to notice how quickly one can work inside Rawtherapee. You do not have to spend hours getting something like wallpaper for your new wide monitor, it should be quick. (I would just like to point out that I do not have a new wide monitor, but my friend does, and he was bemoaning the lack of original wide wallpapers.)
How about we hit the road running as you guys know your way around Rawtherapee already? Under our exposure tab, let’s add some saturation, until the sky actually becomes a better blue. I will increase it by ten (10). Immediately we have more life or realism, if you like. Ten, may even be a bit much, but it is not set in stone and you are welcome to use less. (But - there is a method to the madness.) The idea here is just to teach you that washed out photos are not lost. Though the old ten ton crane is not the focus of the picture, I want to draw the eye to it.
Turn on your HSV equalizer. Bonus points if you knew where it was immediately. Again, we will head to saturation and open its equaliser. I want to create a sine wave between red and yellow, with yellow high and red low. Once I have my sine wave , I want to move the red vertical bar into the orange spectrum, to remove some of the red. That done, we open the equalizer for the value and remove all the points except yellow and red. By now you should know that to remove a point, you simply drag it outside of the box. I will minimize and maximize red an yellow and move the red into orange again, making that gaudy yellow more natural. So now lets see what we can do about the rust? Head into hue and open that equaliser. The adjustments here are a lot more sensitive than the other two values. Zoom in to a section containing the rust. I am going to bump magenta and yellow up and dip red slightly, again moving it towards orange, but only slightly. If you want an artistic photo, this is your chance, just move yellow towards green, until the yellow in the picture fades out. (So those of you who want to get freaky, this is where you get freaky.) Just realise, here is your chance to focus the attention by simply manipulating one colour and muting the rest.
I would like to reiterate that the interpretation of your photo is up to you. Do what makes you happy. If you follow our guides, you will know where to do that.
So now if I turn this picture on its head, crop it and export it, I have another nice wide wallpaper. :) The possibilities are limited by your imagination!
I hope you learned something, and if you have any comments or queries, direct them to misc@fullcirclemagazine.org.