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03/31/2004 07:14:12 PM · #1 |
I learned a lot capturing this shot of the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison. I want to share that with you:
Here is my original and the color version:
 ..
See the processing details below...
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03/31/2004 07:14:32 PM · #2 |
My purpose was to capture the stark, foreboding feeling I get from a prison. The challenge for me with it was fixing the sky in the original because I wanted a dramatic sky effect. The detail was there, it was just overexposed.
No big deal, it should be easy. All you have to do is select and process the building separate from the sky, perfectly fine under advanced rules. (In the end I saved four different selections that I worked on separately for lighting, color and focus for the final result.)
Unfortunately there was a problem. I liked the results using simple autolevels against the sky but even with carefully conceived feathering and numerous trials I always got an annoying colored border between building and sky. It was just like chromatic aberration caused by poor optics. It was in the original and came from either the optics, the photodetector itself or from the in-camera image processor software. It was made much worse by post-processing.
Here is a Photoshop trickâ€Â¦
Cloning out an anomaly along the entirety of an irregularly shaped border is all in the selection process. After finishing I re-selected the sky with the magic wand, expanded it by 1 pixel to include the entire color aberration in the sky-part selection and then adjusted it by hand in a few places to be sure I got it selected right everywhere. Then I used the clone tool to remove the annoying border and the healing tool to smooth out the sky. Because of the selection you never mess up the building part yet it is very fast and easy. That is the trick.
Sky brightness was decreased a little and building brightness and contrast was increased a little to reduce the overwhelming sky. I created a 50% greyscale overlay layer and used it with carefully selected brushes to darken and lighten certain highlights of the building to give it better texture and more interest as was suggested to me for improvement. I tried to enhance what already existed, not create something new that was not there before.
Noise reduction using Neat Image was applied to the sky. In the color version of the image some saturation of red and yellow was added to the building for effect. Slight USM was applied differently to two separate areas. The archway was sharpened less than the rest of the image to reduce over sharpening. I was undecided about whether the sky should be sharpened at all, but decided in the end to sharpen it the same as the building to reduce the differences introduced by Neat Image.
These adjustments allowed me to achieve my intended goal and I was pleased with the final greyscale result!
I want to thank all those folks who took the time to review and critique this image for me.
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03/31/2004 08:32:16 PM · #3 |
Great photo and editing.
I'm confused. Isn't March Free Study still open for submissions?
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03/31/2004 08:39:48 PM · #4 |
Originally posted by Marjo:
Great photo and editing.
I'm confused. Isn't March Free Study still open for submissions? |
I agree, very well done. I think Steve is trying to tell us that he has something even better to share int the Free Study!
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