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So this week’s exercise I found to be very frustrating. For the first image, I just used the black and white eyedropper tools to get the contrast set and then adjusted the midtone slider a little to the left to bring back some of the details that were lost from the horse in the foreground. The levels adjustment tool was fine and simple to work with but I greatly preferred the curves adjustment tool. It felt very easy to work with and I liked that you could get a bit more in-depth with it as opposed to the levels adjustment. I especially enjoyed the click-and-drag function of the curves adjustment as it made me feel very in control and it made experimenting more fun. For the second image, it’s hard to remember everything I did to it because I spent an eternity fiddling with it. It looks like I moved the left input slider to the right to about 10 or 11 and then changed a few spots on the RGB curve. I didn’t mess with the colors too much because all of the adjustments I tried to make seemed to just be too much. I don’t think I could really feel satisfied with the second image using only the one tool, but I am excited to use the curves adjustment tool on other images.
The detail you managed to get out of the first image and the lovely yellow tones throughout the image are really impressive. I found the area around the horse in the foreground’s eye the most difficult to lighten.
I struggled with the second image more as well. The brights were so bright that when I tried to adjust the dark tones, I lost the bright ones entirely for a while! You did a really great job getting the color and the detail out of the leaves/stalks of the plants – I can actually see the plant fibers!