Ready to go

[Mhayes]

Johnboy,

I think you are doing great. What I would do is to have my background layer and a duplicate on top of it. On the duplicate I would use the Shadow/Highlight. If for some reason you do not like it later, you could trash that layer and make another duplicate. If you are reasonably happy with what you have done, but later want some more contract or some other tweaks, your best bet would be to do an Adjustment Layer with either Curves or Levels. These are non-destructive and you can come back and make changes to them with no problem.

If you went into Lab to do the S/H, you may have flattened your original file. Once you get a feel for doing this, it won't seem so strange. Also, S/H comes up with the default and does not keep your previous settings. I only use the S/H once and the rest of my tweaks are always done with adjustment layers.

Margie

[Johnboy]

Hannie & Margie,

Thanks for replies. I figured that it was a start over kind of thing if I didn't care for the results, but just wanted to be sure. I'll take care to record any settings in the future so I can remember what to change if I would want to do that. When working on this one I did use LAB color and had to flatten the image. I also made a copy of the background layer before making the changes as suggested.

Hannie, I went back to the first photo that you said you liked. I added a Hue/Saturation layer and set the Saturation at +12. I had added some Midtone Contrast in the original S/H adjustment. I don't remember the setting but it was around 8 or plus or minus of that number. So I didn't make any contrast changes in this latest version.

First Post S/H adjustment


First post S/H adjustment with Hue/Saturation layer added


Let me know what you think.

Johnboy