Processed in PhotoLab 5 or 6, finished in Affinity Photo. Looking at it now, I do like the composition quite a bit, but the bokeh is way, way too busy and harsh. Very distracting.
Some of it stems from the gear (only had Canon’s “nifty-fifty” on hand), but also, I may have exacerbated the issue by using ClearView+ globally instead of putting it locally on the bird. Very stupid in hindsight, I should’ve known better than to dehaze bokeh, but I have lost the RAW, so it is what it is.
Question is, how can I soften the out of focus area without it looking too obviously artificial? I’m thinking about PhotoLab’s perspective tab - the digital tilt-shift in particular - but that’s an area of the program I haven’t used, so I’m at a bit of a loss here.
You can use a soft brush and paint over the areas you want to blur
e.g. with completely low contrast and negative microcontrast.
Or try different layers, vary the brush size, reduce the brush opacity …
In all seriousness though, I’m a huge fan of the effect. Sure, it gets ugly pretty quickly if you overdo it, but you could say the same for most sliders.
Can be very useful even without atmospheric haze, as long as you like the sharp digital look. It has saved otherwise unusable photos of mine, and it can make cheap lenses punch above their weight in a way normal sharpening can’t. Even in the above photo, it did improve the in-focus parts quite a bit.
Not ClearView’s fault I was stupid enough to apply it globally (and then lose the original RAW).
@Wolfgang Thanks for that. It hides the problem rather than fix it, but probably the best that can be done at this point.
The problem with ClearView is that it causes colour drifts.
Just try to replace it with a small amount of contrast/ micro contrast/ fine contrast plus a touch of " black tones " (I don’t know the English for that slider).
Yeah, but fine contrast is not a basic function of PhotoLab - not everyone has FilmPack - and you’d need fine in combination with micro, as ClearView touches both types.
You can compensate for the color drift as long as you do the color work after ClearView in your workflow.
And that’s the reason I often like it ;-). For some landscapes the yellowish-green range may become too unnatural indeed, but then I use HSL. There are other possible issues with CV, like haloing, strong interaction with WB settings, or busy bokeh like in OP, so one has to be careful. CV seems to be more controversial than Fuji Velvia 50 film
I don’t think CV can be replaced by micro/fine-contrast. CV acts more on much lower frequencies and vibrancy. And I think you meant Selective Tone → Blacks slider. Actually I would like ‘Deep Blacks’ slider added for that purpose – Blacks span too much sometimes, so I have to use Tone Curve then (btw, with PL7 ToneCurve there was no way to get the precise curve, other than manually editing the dop file, a crazy way of doing things).
Nor do I. It was just an advice when the image is not a foggy landscape and you want to give it a CV like effect, I found that it was worth trying with micro-contrast + Selective tone / black. But each one of us has a different taste. Fortunately.
