Finding photo problems using Curves in Photoshop

The technique is very easy. In Photoshop, create a new curves layer, and create an extreme contrast using the curve. Just click on it in the left are, and pull it to the top, and then on the right area create a second point and pull it down. It should look something like in this Photoshop screenshot.

It does not have to be exact, just have something that looks similar. What this did is to brighten the shadows, darken the highlights and added a lot of contrast in the mid-tones. The photo will look crazy colorful and psychedelic now.

But when you look at it, you can see that immediately problems stand out. Things that very barely visible are standing out really brightly right now.

Here are a few examples of it. Fist, a spot when two parts of a panorama were connected. You can see on the left, that it looks fine, but once you apply this filter, the bad transition shows up.

Secondly, here is an example of dust spots, using this filter makes them stand out much more. Will not work everywhere, but most of the time it will help a lot.

Also, lens flares will be much more visible. You can see one in the previous photo, and here is one more example of it. While in the regular photo, the flare is barely visible, after the filter you can see it exactly.

Let’s look at one more example. This is a sky that is not evenly lit due to being merged from multiple photos. If you try to fix it, it’s not that easy, as the differences are minimal. But once you apply the curves layer, the problem is visible immediately.

The simplest way to work with it is to have the curves layer on top, and then edit a layer under it. Then when you are done just turn off or delete the curves layer and you are done.

A little bonus for you. When you have uneven color transitions, mostly in skies or after you removed some object using content aware, it’s easy to fix them. Use strong blur on the area and then add noise to the area. Blur will create a nice transition, while the noise will prevent it from creating color banding. Best to do this on a separate layer and then paint it in with the layer mask.

New wallpapers

And here are the new ones.

When you don’t need a better camera

You often don’t need a better camera at all. To get better photos you usually need to change other things.

Is your composition good?
The most important thing about a photo is the composition. If your composition is bad, the photo is bad. And a better camera will not help you with this. Instead look for tutorials, guides, look at other photographers work and practice more.

Did you learn the basics?
Here I don’t mean just how to control you camera, but much more. Modes, histogram, focusing, choosing the best settings and so on. While the software in the camera is quite smart, you usually can get much more if you do things yourself. Even the best camera will not focus properly all the time, will not choose the best settings for what you need, and sometimes it can even make thing worse. I still remember the day when I switched to manual focusing. My photos became so much sharper instantly.

Do you edit your photos?
Continuing from the previous point. By post-processing your photos you can get much better results than directly from a camera. Try choosing a software you like and learning how to use it. Photoshop, Lightroom, Aurora or similar. Most are not that hard to get into and you can get them quite cheaply.

You maybe need something else
Maybe you don’t need a better camera, but an accessory. Again this depends on the type of photography. But maybe you need a sturdy tripod if you want to do landscapes. Or an external flash if you do portraits.

When you need a better camera

This is very depending on what you do. But here are few reasons.

You need higher resolution
This happened to me. As quite a lot of my photos end up being printer big, especially as wall sized posters, I just needed more resolution. I just can’t make a panorama of every photo. Also screen resolutions go up and up every year. 4k is equal to 8Mpix, 8k to 33Mpix. That is a crazy amount of pixels. And yes, there are upscalers, but they are not always the solution.

You need a faster camera
There are type of photography, where a fast camera and even faster focusing is a must. Sports photography is a good example here. If your camera is slow, you will not get the shot. It has to be able to save the photo quickly and focus even quicker.

Your work demands it
This is a bit indirect reason, but it can happen. For instance I bought a TSE lens, because I knew I would have to do over a 1000 interior photos for a client. So having this did make the whole work quicker and much easier.

Weather and dust resistance
Better cameras usually have better weather and dust resistance, and are made from stronger materials. You can see it if you compare a pro camera to a consumer one. There are much more resistant. My lenses fell on the ground, my camera fell, my tripod got bend and similar. Things happen. Everything works.

Topaz A.I. Gigapixel

You can guess what it does based on the name, but if you did not, it is to resize your photos into much bigger ones. Again, as with the JPEG to RAW AI, the interface is very simple. You just load the image, set the scale, noise reduction and output format. Then it takes few minutes to create your result (of course based on the size of the photo, size of the result and the power of your PC). Converting a 36Mpix JPG into a 1Gigapixel took around 5 minutes for me.

Result examples

Since there is not much to talk about workflow, let’s directly look at some result examples. In all cases, on the left is a version resized to the same size using the automatic resample in Photoshop. On the right is the Topaz A.I. Gigapixel result. All the examples are quite big, as the difference is better visible then.

So first, just to illustrate the difference in size, here is a 100% zoom on a 36Mpix photo, and a 100% zoom after it was resized to 1 Gigapixel. The scale was set to 6x for this one, and yes, the difference is huge.

Now let’s see the detail comparison. Here is a 22Mpix (19Mb JPG) photo from Dubai.

After the 6x resize, it became a 684Mpix photo (551Mb JPG). So let’s zoom into the area in the center. First, this is a 50% zoom.

And here is a 100% zoom to the same spot. You can see, the A.I. Gigapixel result has much more clarity. The machine learning algorithm really selects out the edges, and ads detail when it finds them. So the result is much more detailed, even if fully zoomed in you can see some edge artifacts.

Let’s look at another photo from Bratislava. This was a 36Mpix photo (27Mb JPG) resized with the 6x scale to 1Gigapixel (783Mb JPG). Again, first, here is a 50% zoom.

And here is a 100% zoom. As you can see, A.I. Gigapixel did really nice work here, with cleaning up the sky, and defining the church outline. It’s a bit worse on the trees, but there of course it has less to work with.

Topaz JPEG to RAW AI

Topaz JPEG to RAW AI has a very simple interface. You could call it a image converter, as that’s all it provides. It converts your JPEG into a RAW. You can only choose the input file, choose how strong the noise and blur reduction is and then the output path. You can then choose you output format, being either DNG or TIFF.

In the first version I got, I was not able to open the DNG results in Camera raw or Lightroom, but there was an update since then and now both results work fine.

So all you need to do here, is to load the file and save the result. It take up to a minute to create it, based on the photo used.

Result examples

I did not take a JPEG photo in a very long time. So to try this out, I vent back into my photo library, and I chosen few photos from my photography beginnings.

So fist, let’s look at this photo taken in Liverpool in 2009. There are a lot of shadow areas, so it would be a good candidate for conversion. In all screenshots you will see the original JPEG on the left, the converted DNG on the right. (all these screenshots are quite big, as you would need to see it bigger to see the details)

First impression is, that it cleans up the chromatic aberrations very well. It also added a lot of clarity and sharpness to the photo. In the zoomed image you can see it quite noticeably on the buildings decorations.

But lets open the shadows, and let’s see what effect it will have there. I put shadows to +100 and added one stop of exposure to both version in Lightroom.

I especially like how clear the sign looks in the DNG version. While the overall brightness in the DNG did not change, the photo is much cleaner, sharper, the clarity is much better. Overall is much crisper than the JPG.

I tried to match the result I got using Lightroom, but no luck. Each time I bumped the noise reduction, I would get a blury mess, not a nice crisp result as I got from the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI.

Let’s look at two more photos. The results are quite the same. The boost in clarity and sharpens is quite high (maybe even too much on the nature photo), but I have not noticed much of dynamic range expansion.

If you want to check it out for yourself, here are the original JPGs and the TIFF and DNG conversions for download.