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!

There were two windows in the little tower.

I wasn’t as happy with the shot of the second window as I was with the first.

I think the major issue I had with this shot is the burned out spot on the window itself. Lesson learned – diffusers are your friend.

This is number 2 of three images of the tower I have. The third is currently on my “how do I fix that” pile. (More on this later in the week…. probably).

There’s been a fair bit of post processing here.

I created three duplicate smart objects in CS3. One exposed for the window, one for the wall and hedge and one for the sky.

These were then blended through before being flattened and converted to black and white using a gradient filter. The filters opacity was reduced to give that washed out feel and a mask was used to retain the window.

Then it was (maybe over) sharpened.

I quite liked the result.

Apart from the burned out bit. :(

OK, so a week or so ago I posted the picture of the water drops on the sepia coloured rose. I've kind of decided not to use that picture for the water round of the competition. (Not because I don't like it, more because it's a rose bud with water rather than water on a rose bud).

... Anyhow, I was playing with the picture in Photoshop and decided to raise the exposure of the right side before removing the highlights from the water droplets to see what effect it had on the picture. It's left me in a dilemma about which I prefer.

 

So, which is better?

OK, so technically it's the same old boat from Cruit Island as before, but I was playing and thought I'd share.

This has fallen foul of my current fascination. Graduated filters in Lightroom 2. Well worth investing in or using the demo if you can get it.

The following thumbnail gives you an idea of the picture before the filters were applied. (Sorry, didn't bother uploading the full size version of it).

Now, as you can probably tell, the original image suffered from the usual problems encountered (by me anyway) on a bright day in that it was left very washed out and feeling flat.

Adding a filter to the top right, running down to the middle of the picture in a diagonal has allowed the sky to come back into its own. A few other tweaks to curves and general contrast and exposure and hopefully things look a little better.

Now, lets be honest. It was never a great picture to start with, but I made all these changes in about 10 minutes. (Less time than it took to knock together this post).

The simplicity of Lightroom 2 is just fantastic.

I'm really going to have to pull my pennies together to get that Macro lens I mentioned. I can already see just how addictive taking that sort of picture could be.


(no exif information for you right now...)

One thing to note in this picture is that rather than make some tweaks in Lightroom myself to fix up contrast etc, I made use of a preset. Lightroom provides a number of "out of the box" presets which, while interesting, can be quite limited. However, there are a large number of presets available on the web (both charged for and free). these can have quite an effect on your image.

I'm not sure that using a preset isn't some form of cardinal sin - after all every image should be treated as a new challenge and one size probably shouldn't fit all. However, as a starting point (or if you like the effect), they can be really useful and give some impressive results.

One of the best preset selections I played with so far were referenced on ReallyJapans blog (kudos to him for sharing the find). You can find them here from the original author Kim Long (thanks to her for sharing them so generously).