As you can see the photo to the left has problems. Click here and download the high resolution JPEG. The owners of the Inn say that this particular picture must be used for their brochure. They believe it captures some of the mystique of the Inn— & it does.
The problem, of course is that it cannot be printed without major repairs. Without those repairs It would look like this once it was printed (or even worse): So like many times in the real world toyou are given something that is less than wonderful and taksed with making it usable (at least) or impressive with inspriation and perspiration.
First, you need to choose Image>> Adjust>> Curves. You need to severely adjust the contrast in the shadows with a curve something like what you see tothe left. IN older version tyou will not see the histogram in back of the curve.
Then in the History palette Options menu make a New Snapshot.
Call it Curves and make it the source of your History Brush by clicking next to the Curves thumbnail.
Click on the Open history state (as you can see above it is the first history state when the image was first opened). This makes the highly modified image after Curves the source of your History brush when you start painting with it).Set the Blending mode of your History Brush to Screen and/or Lighten and carefully lighten the dark shadows. Save before you start this process because might well have to revert to get back where you started.
Then set your original as the source of your History brush and use the Screen mode to lighten the bricks and foliage. Then use the the Multiply mode to add detail and darken the overexposed areas and the sunlit trees to the left. The result should look something like this:
The result should look like you see above or better. Then double-click on the Cropping tool and set a fixed size of 3" wide, 3" tall, and 300 dpi. Marquee off the image and crop. It should look like this (yes this is a different verion):
Next Select all, choose Edit>> Free Transform and adjust the perspective distortion.
Next convert to CMYK, select the channels that appear to have the most contrast, and convert to grayscale. I used the Cyan and Black channels for this one.
Now we will use Image>> Adjust>> Curves to lighten and improve contrast. This curve also adjusts the darkest shadow to 85% and the lightest highlight to 7%.
Finally we will carefully sharpen, using UnSharp Mark and the Sharpen and blur tools. Clone out any white or black artifacts caused by all of the adjustments. The final result should look like this or better. If you look closely, you will see that I left a white spot under the left arm of the bench by mistake.
You will save the file as a JPEG and attach it to an email to your instructor.