I recently bought a used NEC MultiSync LCD2490WUXi professional monitor after a long discussion about color management. Long story short, among other things this new to me monitor brought to light are the many flaws in my images that my regular LCD monitor help hide. So now that I can "see" better I find myself re-processing many of my images and also using some processes I had't before. Harry's videos are of the utmost value to me as I see the process in real time on a real image. What I'm unclear about is when or in what order to use these. The latest two processes I've been using is LHE and AdaptiveStretch, both very good at giving new life to somewhat flat images. I was having some struggles until I review Harry's LHE video again and realized I was forgetting the masking part. Big difference in noise reduction with the mask. And for me at least, adaptive stretch seems only to be usable on a masked image. Keep in mind these images have been calibrated, aligned, stacked, RGB and Lum masters made, cropped as needed, dbe, background neutralization, color corrected as needed (last two not on Lum of course), masked stretched with background preview, and usually SCNR of RGB image. At this point I'll likely do some HDRW and curves adjustments. By now I'm close to where I want to be and I'll try using adaptive stretch and LHE to bring some dynamic range back into the image. After creating a mask by extracting the luminance layer form the rgb image I'll apply the mask and use the full preview to make adjustments before apply my final settings and repeat this using LHE. Of course I'm saving after each step and trying to name it to reflect both the process used and its setting. Something like _lhe25 would tell me I used 2.5 for my contrast limit. I'm finding that my Kernel Radius is usually between 100-250 and usually doesn't make any large differences but I'll adjust and see what the preview shows me.
After all this, the question behind this posting is if the order of process is logical and correct or should I be doing them in a different order? Now I realize that processing is a personal process and each person looks for different results but the bottom line is if any process is out of order I suspect the results can be quite different or even less than effective. Like doing HDRW on a linear image. Plus it wouldn't hurt to know if there are steps that would be beneficial that are missing. Again I realize that can be subjective but it doesn't hurt to ask. I'll try to follow up with a more step by step of a particular image latter after I get some more reprocessing done.
