Adjusting irregular shapes w/o Nik

I need to adjust saturation in a photo which is dominated by snow on the ground and in trees. The item of interest in a woman riding a horse. She has a jacket that’s IMHO too saturated for the scene.

Using Nik Collection, I can single out the jacket and adjust only its saturation while leaving the rider’s face, and the horse un altered. Later, I warmed up the horse’s coat to a more appropriate dark brown.

How can this be done, under PL4, without Nik Collection? The key item is dealing with an irregular shape, and avoiding altering other items (e.g., background).

If I understand your question correctly - have a look at local adjustments and u-points. Remember there are also “protective” u-points

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Hello @RBEmerson,

  • Yes, @Sigi is correct you can do it with Local Adjustments in PL (you can use brush, control points, auto brush etc):

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Regards,
Svetlana G.

Mea culpa for not replying sooner.

The problem isn’t how to adjust saturation, vibrancy, etc. The challenge is to be very specific about where it happens.


This is a quick and dirty grab of a small section of the image (lots of pixelation!). In this sample, the saturation, contrast, and couple of other values have been altered. The trees in the background are as original.

The intent is to adjust only the jacket, not the horse, or snow trees. With Nik’s Viveza I can get a control point to process only the jacket, and not alter the horse or trees. One control point does what I need.

My question is how to do this without using Nik. AFAIK my only choice is to draw lots of little circles to get the area of interest. Or am I missing a more efficient way to select only the jacket?

Quick and dirty without NIK is to use control points in PL.

You don’t need to draw a great deal of little ones if you make use of negative points i.e. select the jacket as normal with control points and adjustments.

Enable the mask view THEN hold down Alt and click in any areas of overspill from your original selections. This will give you negative control points that effectively remove any corrections that have ‘leaked’ over from your original selection points

See this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RphMdrF9MYI

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Went there, saw that, way too many circles.

I cruised YouTube and came up with this: https://youtu.be/yQeEV5VTONY?t=1525

(I’ve set the link to drop in at the part that applies to this thread.)

I watched this. It shows what I’m looking for. One small point. This is done with PL3 and I’m using PL4.

If PL4 has these options, buttons (e.g. reset local adjustments), etc. seen in this video, darned if I can find it.

Not sure what you mean?

This is PL4:

image

Single point and the ‘rotation arrow’ at the end is reset all the adjustments at that point.

The 2 buttons on the bottom of the screen in the video you show is from the Mac version. So Windows users don’t get this at the moment :frowning:

The selection works well in the video because there is a wide difference in colour between the selection and the background. Closer together and it becomes harder.

e.g.the face in my clip is easier because it is radically different in colour from the suit and background.

image

I wondered if using a Mac had a hand in the presentation. More than I expected… sigh…

How did you get the face… what?.. inverted? That’s a big part of what’s useful in Nik.

No worries about picking the right part of something to get the desired selection. Most of the time it comes easily.

This was in PL4 on Win 10

Use the selection point, then hit ‘M’ This ‘inversion’ actually shows the mask that is applied by the selection point.
White = 100% applied and Black = 0% applied with the shading in between denoting the intensity of how much the selection point affects the surroundings.
The effect is only temporary while viewing the mask.

Happy, happy, joy, joy! [/ very big grin!]

Unfortunately, the image that prompted the question is a JPG. White balance changes are locked out for non-RAW images. Grrr…

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