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photos suitable for ContrastMaster

Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 6:40 am
by camner
Are certain photos better able to take advantage of CM than others? And how does one tell by looking?

Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 6:36 pm
by HaraldHeim
Yes, certain photos can benefit better from ContrastMaster than others. Such photos usually look a bit flat and do not have deep shadows or bright highlights. Additionally ContastMaster works good on large image areas with little contrast, e.g. clouds, walls and other textures areas.

Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 9:24 pm
by camner
Thanks for your reply. Doesn't ContrastMaster also increase noise, particularly in uniform areas such as walls, sky, etc? When using CM on a beach scene I found that the sky was unacceptably turned gritty...with a bunch of small black/grey "flecks" that made a pristine sky look like what I imagine Shanghai looks like!

Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 11:51 pm
by HaraldHeim
If the image contains noise, ContrastMaster can make the noise more visible if you apply it with a very high intensity. It is not advisable to apply the ContrastMaster effect to a blue sky. You can use ContrastMaster's Mask feature to remove the effect from a blue sky and still have it on the rest of the image.

Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2008 2:41 pm
by Koosla
I've found ContrastMaster to work wonderfully for natural landscapes, with faraway mountains and forests; this is probably in part because CM tends to remove the kind of haze usually found in these pictures, making the result all the more lush.

More generally, it works rather well for pretty much all kinds of pictures if you are aiming at a LucisArt / Dave Hill / Dragan effect; for this kind of post-processing, however, it's usually better to perform some measure of noise reduction either before or after applying ContrastMaster.