Your results are great! Some really awesome help from @rvogt and @evansd2 !!
These turned out beautifully. I’m sure your daughter will treasure them.
I’m glad I saw this about the curve. I always knew to adjust it and what I needed the photo to look like, but it was always trial and error since I totally didn’t understand what the tonal curve meant at all until I just read your post. Now I know what my histogram needs to look like. Thanks for sharing this information!
well… that’s dependent on the photo. In the case of a relatively balanced black and white picture like this with lights and darks and midtones, yeah a relatively flat curve is what you’re shooting for. but if your image originally has lots of dark shadows and then some midtones, then yeah you will still have a pretty shadow-heavy histogram. It’s more an art than a science as far as I see it, a balance of what you are going for and understanding what your image inherently needs. But I’m glad you found it useful!
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Another way to deal with areas like this is the dodge/burn tool in Photoshop. Does Gimp have this? It’s a fairly standard photographic concept from the before-digital days.
Yeah and you can lasso select and alter the curve for this part only too, getting it to match the rest a bit better would be pretty simple. Lots of ways to approach it.
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