October - post processing assignment - Image by Ben H

[Ben H]

I see most people are going for the crops, rather than making the fixes. Chickens!

[tomorrowstreasures]

I know other than introductions this is my first post but i thought i would get right in there

here is what i came up with.

It took all of about 10 minutes.....

1. cropped....
2. rendered clouds....
3. Ran the Topaz Adjust filter
4. played around with the color of the clouds (made them lighter) and blurred them a little bit.

HERE IT GOES

Kissa- great problem solving here! Taking advantage of those puffs by creating the cloud cover - clever!
a wee correction on the horizon line maybe?

[tomorrowstreasures]

did very quickly -
steps were: (in PSPX2)
enamel
sphere
color balance

[tomorrowstreasures]

again - quickly done
enamel
i did something to the color, but i can't remember what
circle

[jmayoff]

First I got rid of that thing in the foreground and got rid of some of the smoke at the back right (photoshop clone tool.) I sharpened (lab color and unsharp mask on lightness channel) and then converted to B&W all but some of the blue (I selected a color range.) I figured there really isn't any color worth preserving here except for that blue. I enhanced the blue (hue/saturation) and then increased the contrast (brightness/contrast.) I found the water wasn't dark enough so I selected it and used brightness contrast again to increase contrast.

[Ben H]

I like the brightness of the dome in your pic, contrasts nicely against the water. Really nice.

BTW - that smudgey thing isn't smoke, it's a plant or something close to the camera (and thus very defocused). Definitely an unwanted artifact, but a pain to remove...

[tomorrowstreasures]

I like the brightness of the dome in your pic, contrasts nicely against the water. Really nice.

BTW - that smudgey thing isn't smoke, it's a plant or something close to the camera (and thus very defocused). Definitely an unwanted artifact, but a pain to remove...

Um, Ben.... Where is your fix?????? hmmmmm?

[Ben H]

It's coming, I've just been a bit swamped lately... I just need to finish it off...

[Ben H]

In the interests of getting something done, I'm going to call it a day on this one. That means many of the pic edits I just ended up doing quickly - if it was more important, I'd do them better, but hey, this is for fun, so...



This small version looks bad and quite noisy, I had a bit of a colour profile battle on output, but you'll get the idea.

Other than general fixes (cloning back the water (although even though I fixed the foreground obstruction, I liked cropping the water a little to shift the attention to the dome), and removing one of the cranes (poorly - I was going to do the other one too, but the wires are too much of a pain). Then some general contrast and colour improvements with multiple adjustment layers targetting different areas.

I dodged and burned, and did selective sharpening - ie I duplicated the image, did an unsharp mask to sharpen it, masked it out completely, then used a layer mask to paint in the sharpening selectively on the construction building, the dome, the boat in front (but not the small boats behind) to help separate those, and I only sharpened the foreground yellow towers, and not the rear ones, to improve the sense of depth - quite effective on the full size, although it's difficult to see in this one.

[kiley9806]

heres my attempt. i basically clarified it, selectively sharpened certain items like the cranes & boats, leveled it, and tried to minimize the smoke by using the 'push' brush. and then i turned it into a negative, just for fun.