edited version looks much sunnier! nice

These results look great!

I wish I was better at photo manipulations. I can take pretty good pictures with my cheapo camera, as far as framing and composition, but I can't seem to be able to use filters to improve or enhance the image.

Most of the time, my attempts to improve the image fails and the picture looks worse than when I started.

I've been comparing the Zone System and Incremental Zone Separator Separator System.
But I was not able to note differences in result between the two scripts.
Maybe because they are very subtle, my perception failed to detect them.
Under the same image changed with the same settings, each using one of the two filters.

Acmespace, The editing became much better!

Thank you Odin. I'll try to learn from there.

Akros,
that's strange. Maybe i did something wrong. According to your comparison I don't see a difference either.
I am looking into to it. maybe i forgot to change the function name of the original script so if you have 2 installed it might produce the same result.

Thank you Akros for finding that bug.

Here's the updated script for Incremental Zone System Separator (I changed the procedure-names so it doesn't confuse itself with the other)

will be available under Script-Fu -> Create New -> Incremental Zone System Separator

Here is a comparison between the two
the original Zone System Separator


the Incremental Zone System Separator

Thx trandoductin,
With this change the differences are clearly visible.

But the separation zones does not occur in fact in Incremental Zone Separator System (IZSS).

if you watch the Zone System Separator (ZSS) will notice that each layer (zone), just a shade is treated. "The script creates layer masks based on the Zone system (tonal ranges eleven)" - Odinbc.

So I can work each tones by selecting a specific layer.

In (IZSS) it does not occur.
The Zone X layer should have the darker tones, includes all tones! Whole picture.
The Zone IX layer has all the other shades, less exclusive to Zone X. layer
The Zone VIII layer has the whole picture, minus the exclusive tones of layers Zone IX and Zone X
The zone VII layer has all other tones, minus the exclusive tones of layers VIII, IX and X.
And so until the Zone layer 0

Thus the single layer having a single tone, is Zone 0.

Yeah, I suck!
I didn't know how to make it so for example Zone 10 only selects the lightess tones. what it does is it selects tones 10 all the way down to darkest, that's why the other zones are on top, to block themselves out so that what's revealed is zone 10.
hope that makes sense

It's probably 1 zone off too. Your original image has the whole picture, so that should be zone 10. But with the script calling levels instead of threshold the result is a little different.

I'd say the script is experimental, it doesn't select true zones like the original (hard pixels).

Now if i could just find a good tutorial that teaches how to use these zones, so far I have ran into photography videos and tutorials of how to spot meter zone 5 and that's about it... no specific tutorials on how or what to apply to these zones to get a sweet looking picture.

Here's another version that goes from brightest tone to darker tones (while including lighter tones). Even when i reverse the order (because it uses levels it won't block out the whole image) so the original image is still the darkest including all lighter tones.

Now been reversed,
The Zone 0 layer now has all the tones, the whole image.
And the Zone X is the only layer that has a single tone.


The essence of the Zone System Separator (ZSS) is to treat the image based on tones.

In this case, if I define only the Zone VI layer as visible, I can not only see tones of that zone. I see all the tones above this layer (zone VII, VIII, IX and X).
So I can not deal with the unique tones of this Zone.

let me play around and see what i can do.

Because this is experimentation,
here's a script that does separate tonal values but soft selects using levels so there is some transparency


here's what colorization looks like (you can see the transparency throughout the image)


I should call it something different now since it's not incremental anymore but more like zone selection using levels.

btw Do you know of any good tutorials/articles on playing with these zones?

maybe this will be useful
picture tone zones
http://photography.tutsplus.com/tutoria ... photo-5607

Thanks. I'll read it.

let me add this as well
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/phot ... one-color/

Mikechat, thanks for the 2nd article.
It's good but in GIMP, there isn't a way to edit the black and white points (like mentioned in the article).
But here's my try using the other steps mentioned.
without using dark and light helpers (created by using threshold)

Using threshold to create dark and light helpers (hinting where dark and light areas are). I used threshold then selected black and cut/deleted it. so that i am left with whites indicating where dark and light areas are.

Then using levels select my original image layer, click on dark and light ares highlighted by the white in above image using the eye dropper and here's the result

One can directly edit the black and white points by changing the left and right Input Levels for each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels in the "Colors->Levels" dialog.

thanks saulgoode!
That's great instruction!
here's another try following that tutorial (some reason it seems to add a warmer tint to the edited maybe because the white points are blue-ish in the sky) Not sure if it looks better or not, but i do like the warm tint

mikechat,
you know of any other good photo enhancement tutorials? I enjoyed the one you pointed me to.

i seen one or two but will have
to look them up again as i did
not get the link for them and
memory isn't as good as it once was.

Very good this.
http://blog.patdavid.net/2011/06/gettin ... ction.html