Contrast Masking with Corel PHOTO-PAINT

© 2003 Hunter Elliott.

Contrast Masking can help in reducing the overall contrast of an image while bringing out more details withing highlights and shadows.

This image from Joan Messer shows a very interesting cloud formation shot in the evening. She had originally asked for help in a newsgroup about getting rid of the noise in this image, especially in the blue sky area. While that is not too difficult to do with this image, I felt that the clouds could really be bumped up in their appearance, too.

What we're doing here is bringing down the highlights in the image so they aren't so blown out and lightening some of the darker areas. The first thing we need to do is to duplicate the background into a new object. The easiest way to do that is Ctrl-D. Let's rename that new object as "Contrast Mask."

The next step is to desaturate this object into a greyscale image. You do this by selecting Image | Adjust | Desaturate.

Now invert this object (Image | Transform | Invert). This makes light areas dark and dark areas light.

Of course you don't want an inverted greyscale image, do you. Go over to the Object Docker and change the Merge Mode for this object to "Overlay".

This certainly makes the image look better, but it can still be improved.

We don't want the Contrast Mask to battle with the original image in terms of detail. To fix this we need to apply a Gaussian Blur to the Contrast Mask (Effects | Blur | Gaussian Blur). A value between 10 and 30 should give good results, but it's something you'll want to experiment with to see what gives you the best results. I chose a level of 20 for this image.

Now for me, the sky is still too grainy. So let's mask off the sky and create a new object from the mask.

The Smart Blur tool is great at smoothing out areas (Effects | Blur | Smart Blur). I ran the Smart Blur at a setting of 15 here.

Since the object contained part of the clouds and we don't want to lose details from the clouds, apply a clip mask to the object and remove the excess. (see my tutorial on colorizing for more info on clip masks).

Other tweaks you can try would be adjusting the transparency of the Contrast Mask object. Or adjust the Tone Curve of the Contrast Mask to change the levels of the shadows and highlights. You could also apply a Clip Mask to the Contrast Mask if you only wanted to select certain areas to apply the effect.

Step and Repeat Around a Circle · Using CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT for Your Best Web Graphics · Quick Color Palette · Creating Distressed Text in CorelDRAW · Contrast Masking with Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Colorizing Black and White Photos in Corel PHOTO-PAINT

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