I’m slowly getting sucked into the world of Twitter.

What’s that got to do with photography you ask?

Well, honestly, it has nothing to do with photography. And kind of everything as well.

Anyway, ignoring the how’s and why’s of Twitter, in my last post I mentioned the image from Mount Stewart  that was on the “how do I fix that” pile. Well, I was fiddling with it on Sunday and having an absolute nightmare with the sky being burned out.

(Short aside – shooting at twilight is great, unless it’s a blue sky day, then I find it really easy to burn out the sky when trying to capture the detail of the scene)

Anyway ,(sorry, lots of asides tonight), I was messing with the image and happened to twit/tweet/twiwhatever about the problem and a nice guy by the name of Sean replied offering his help.

I sent him the image(s) and he took a look at them and came up with a good recovery of the picture. He explains it in detail here.

I quite like his recovery – He seems to have kept more detail int he image, whilst recovering the sky.

Here’s my best attempt -

It’s not initially obvious in this version, but there is a lot of fringing or halo type effects going on where my masking isn’t up to scratch. Also, because I used an underexposed shot for this, there is a lot of noise when the image was recovered.

But apart from my mediocre masking, here’s the process I applied to get here.

Since I new the image would always end up as black and white (I seem to have a thing for architectural black and white shots) the first thing I did was convert the most underexposed version of the shot that I had. I created a duplicate layer of this and then increased the brightness on it before masking the sky through from the original.

The image was then flattened and shadows and highlights applied (Scott Kelby has done a major job convincing me this is a great thing in CS3 and, dammit, he’s right). Then a touch of localised dodging to bring the window back in got me as far as I could take it.

I guess the over-riding lesson is – get it right on the night and you’ll not have to spend your Sunday trying to fix stupid mistakes. Of course, if I’d got it right first time, I wouldn’t have got chatting with Sean.

Oh, and if you twit/tweet/twoot/twype, then this is me!