LightZone "Smooth Contrast" Experiment

I've been experimenting with LightZone to duplicate the effect available through a Photoshop action, which I am told employs layers of sharpening and Gaussian blur to achieve a heightened but smooth contrast. The effect is really attractive, beautiful and heightens the sense of form in a color photograph, to give it some of the essence of a black and white photograph. I have a strong affinity for this look.

This is my first try, with two pairs of sharpen and blur effects, one for shadow and one for highlight, stacked this way: SH Zone Shadow, GB Zone Shadow and SH Zone Highlight, GB Zone Highlight. The result is a good first approximation to the effect I'm looking for.


The sharpening is set to enhance local contrast and the blur layer above it smooths out any graininess and blends the tones together.

The action I am trying to duplicate is Midnight Black available from Action Central. I have not downloaded or examined this action to reverse engineer it, because I wanted to see if I could unlock its secrets without anything but the results. I doubt I could apply much I could learn from the action to LightZone, other than the tools and stacks in LightZone provide much of the masking and selectivity that PhotoShop does in a much more intuitive way. I believe it has all I need to eventually duplicate this look. I do not have PhotoShop only Elements.

I hate to lengthen this post by waxing philosophically, but use of this action raises the question of how much of the resulting image is the photographer and how much is "Photoshop?" Putting aside the issue of legitimacy of manipulating an image to this degree so easily using a predefined action, I will take a stab at an answer. I give Photoshop credit for half the creative energy in such an image. "What percentage of what makes the image compelling is from Photoshop?" is the question I am forced to ask myself. About half is a conclusion I cannot escape. The other half is the traditional elements of camera and photographer approaching the subject. Without the effect, the image would lose much of its effect.

When I say "image" I mean the original image that inspired me to explore the effect, not necessarily the one in this post, although the same principle applies. You can see the original where this all started on Bootstrap's site (http://www.bootstrapimages.com/Web1107/PB085980-02a%20copyR.jpg), but I won't link to it individually, or guarantee it will be there when you look. Bill Turner also has a blog on Blogger, Eschew Obfuscation.