How can I make photos cleaner and more transparent?
“How to make photos cleaner?” “How to make photos more transparent?” “How to make photos clearer?”
In fact, all these problems can be summed up to explain. Personally, the so-called “clean” or “transparent” refers to “not dirty and not messy”, and I think the main influencing factors include equipment, early composition, late color mixing and picture details.
1、 Equipment
Although this is a relatively minor factor, it is still put in front.
Photographic equipment of the same specification, no doubt the more expensive, the better. No matter how well you use the small spittoon, it is not as good as Otus. No matter how well you make the black card, it is not as good as the full picture, let alone 8 × 10. The resolution, color difference, anti glare ability, color tendency, dynamic range and high sense will all affect the picture. In order to better display the original picture and later space, better equipment should be selected as far as possible.
Here is another filter. The effect of filters on the cleanliness of the picture is very significant. The degradation of sharpness and color deviation caused by inferior filters cannot be ignored. Therefore, UVs and CPLs should be used as little as possible, while ND and GND must be from large manufacturers.
2、 Prophase
The early stage mainly includes composition and shooting.
1. Composition
Let’s start with composition. Composition is actually the arrangement of elements in the picture. The composition of an excellent work must be simple and clear. If there are many sundries or other irrelevant things on the composition, it will definitely lead to unclean. To take an extreme example, such still life works in the figure below are definitely not dirty, except for the main body, which is left blank.
Another counter example. Not to mention the color problem, the branches, stones and their reflections on the right side, the ripples on the water surface, etc. can not highlight the main body, but make the elements of the picture messy and unclean.
A good composition should focus on the main body. It can be ensured that the main body is prominent through object layout, guide line, perspective method, focal segment and other composition methods, and there is no object that will interfere with the line of sight.
Of course, you can also use some skills, such as slow door, silhouette and so on.
2. Shooting
The early shooting has a great impact on the picture effect.
For example, defocusing and glare, of course, the biggest impact may be the weather. In the weather such as overcast or haze, the normal shooting will not have a good effect, but it can be shot from a different angle, such as the slow door shooting in overcast days, and the long focus shooting in haze weather. Although the weather is good, some techniques can be used to avoid bad weather.
It should also be noted that many viewing platforms are separated by a layer of dirty glass, which has a significant impact, and there is no good solution. As shown in the figure below, there is both reflection and glare, and the definition is also reduced, so we have to choose a good angle.
3、 Tinting
Tinting is also very relevant to the early stage, but in order to reduce space, we put it in the later stage. Tone can be divided into shadow and tone.
1. Shadow tone
In terms of tone, the main cause of unclean is usually “ash”. If there is a strong sense of fog, it must be unclean, just like a layer of ash.
For example, in this picture, due to the haze, the level is not obvious, and it looks impenetrable.
It is also obvious from the histogram that the pixels are stacked in the bright part, and the contrast is small, so it will look very dirty.
At this time, the later method is to increase the contrast. Note that “contrast” is not simply “contrast”. In addition to directly improving contrast, primary and secondary contrast, local contrast, color contrast, contrast between different tones, contrast under different tones, etc. For example, the conventional adjustment in landscape photography: reducing highlights and increasing shadows actually reduces the overall contrast, but strengthens the contrast between the sky and the landscape.
There are also many tools to increase contrast, such as directly increasing contrast, adjusting color scale, using curves, improving clarity, lightening and deepening, and various plug-ins. Then you can re apply all the above methods in different areas. There are many ways to do this.
It should be noted that enhancing contrast does not mean greatly improving contrast. This will make the picture too wordy, and it is easy to be visual tired if you see too much, such as the following figure.
In addition, improving the brightness of the picture, including overexposure, can also effectively make the picture cleaner, which can create a lot of white places and make the picture more concise. The premise is that the composition and color of the picture itself are no problem, and overexposure will not affect the expression of the picture. Of course, low-key photos can also be very clean.
2. Hue
Hue is much more complex, from hue, saturation, lightness point by point.1) Color matching
First of all, color matching is actually color matching, which is a relatively core issue.a) First of all, monochrome and black and white photos are easy to look clean, because there is only one main color without interference. This can be controlled in the early stage or unified in the later stage. For example, the following picture is a monochrome cold color photo.
It can also be seen from the vector diagram that the color is mainly near cyan, and the color in the picture is mainly different in lightness and saturation.
b) At the same time, similar to the monochrome system, adjacent colors will achieve similar visual effects.
For example, the following pictures are adjacent colors of yellow and green.
The above two are very safe color matching or color mixing schemes, which will give people a very comfortable experience. It is difficult to have problems. At least they can meet the needs of cleanliness, although they may produce a monotonous feeling.
c) Then let’s talk about complementary colors. In fact, this is a very common color scheme, but it is often the reason why the picture is not clean. Most people’s color scheme may choose complementary colors or varieties of complementary colors (such as complementary colors and triangular colors).
Generally speaking, a better solution is to make complementary colors occupy a part of the screen to set off each other, as shown in the following figure:
Or take one color as the main body and another color as the contrast, such as the second picture.
As long as the complementary colors of two graphs are basically concentrated in one region, it is OK, but the taboo is that the colors are distributed in an intricate way. For example, in the following figure, yellow, red, green and blue exist, and they are scattered. Is it not so clean. Of course, there are also saturation and contrast problems.
2) Color purity
颜色的纯净程度对画面也有很大影响，比如说如果蓝色中掺杂了黄色的话，则会变成中性色，这会导致颜色发灰，显得不干净。其实原理很简单，纯蓝色是R=G=0，B>0的，而纯黄色是R=G>0，B=0的，等比例混合在一起的时候相当于灰色和黄色或蓝色的混合，如果R、G、B恰好相等的话，就直接是灰色了。
At this time, you can use channel curves or optional colors to eliminate noise and make your eyes more pure. Select a color, add adjacent colors to it, and reduce complementary colors to make the color more thorough. To put it simply, if you want to strengthen blue, you should increase cyan and magenta, and reduce yellow; If you want to strengthen red, you should increase yellow and magenta, and reduce cyan.
Next, let’s talk about saturation and lightness. First, we introduce a color theory, PCCS 12 hue. PCCS is a color system developed in Japan, which divides eye color into 12 tones according to different combinations of saturation and lightness.
From left to right, the saturation gradually increases; From bottom to top, lightness gradually improves.
It can be seen from the color observation that the colors of p, lt and b are clean and bright, the colors of s and v are bright and rich, the colors of ltg and sf are simple and elegant, and the colors of g, d, dkg, dk and dp are gloomy. Therefore, if you want the picture to be clean, it is recommended to choose the upper part, especially the color in the first row, as the main color. If you want to use low lightness photos, try to keep the color low saturation at the same time, because colors such as d, dk, dp are really difficult to control.
3) Saturation
As shown in the above figure, a relatively simple way to make the picture clean is to reduce the saturation. High saturation will make the picture look like oil painting, which is very greasy, while low saturation will be much more refreshing, as shown in the following figure.
Or keep the main body highly saturated and reduce the saturation of other colors, which will also play a role in highlighting the main body, as shown in the following figure.
When the distinction between the subject and others is not obvious, the unified saturation will also make the picture look more comfortable. As shown in the figure below, orange and blue are contrasting colors with similar saturation. Of course, this is on the premise that the saturation is not too high, otherwise there may be a strong sense of oil painting.
4) Lightness
In terms of lightness, it is relatively simple. The following are the main colors or the main colors. High brightness and low saturation will make the photo look very fresh.
The combination of high brightness and high saturation will present a bright and rich feeling.
Low brightness and low saturation will present a more tranquil and quiet atmosphere. This is probably the case. Of course, there will be many counterexamples. According to the specific situation, there is no dead law in color mixing.
4、 Details
In fact, this is easy to say. First, the edges should be clear, that is, sharp enough. Second, the quality of the picture should be fine and natural. Photos with more meat, noise and particles are not clean. Take a look at these two photos. It is obvious which one has cleaner details.
Therefore, we should ensure that there is not too much noise in the early stage, and do not add particles indiscriminately or sharpen too much in the later stage.
