Before we start
Welcome back to the now named Editing Friday. I am sorry that this day of my blog has been quiet for a couple of weeks but sometimes life gets in the way. I decided to change the theme of the day slightly. I was not running out of images to re-edit but i wanted to make this a general day where i show “normal” editing of photos. I say normal because i am also in future weeks going to show more graphic/digital art work flows, like with the Abstract Mosaic I posted earlier this week.
Get Ready for Action
It has been freezing this week so i though i would edit a picture that i took a while ago but never got round to editing it.
I was given the inspiration for doing this picture after watching a seminar on new features in CS6 (we should always be homing our skills, else they be rusty).
In this seminar Tim Grey was talking about the crop tool and its many functions. One of them being perspective crop. I had seen of this is CS4 but was stuck in my old ways of using the Transformation Tool or the Lens Correction tool and then cropping.
So with my picture I made a HDR conversion using Nik HDR Efex and then imported the image into Photoshop.
As you can see I took the image looking up at the church and tower. Because I did not use a tilt shift camera or lens the church looks distorted.
I selected the Perspective Crop tool that is underneath the Crop Tool. Click the crop tool on the tools palette to see the secondary tools.
You need to draw a square with the crop tool which will give you your selected area and a grid to help you. Using the corners of the grid you can make a selection in perspective, by aligning the lines of the building to the grid . Because this tool is destructive i saved the original HDR conversion so as to have a back up.
Once you have the selection in perspective you can then crop.
With my selection the bottom corner would be clear because nothing was selected. I used the content aware patch tool to fill in this empty space.
Now with the image cropped the perspective is a lot better but not perfect, though workable.
Next I did a little house keeping I first added a curves layer, reduced the noise using noise ninja and converted the image to black and white. For my conversion I used Alien Skin Exposure to mimic the tones of Kodak T-max 400 film pushed 2 stops.
I then added a dodge and burn layer to selectively lighten the alcoves in the tower and the lighter bricks and to darken the darker bricks and the right side of the tower.
I then created a new fill layer 50% grey and drew a gradient from the top down. I set the layer to overlay and lowered the opacity to make it more natural. I then added a Layer mask to mask out areas of the tower.
Finally i added a hue and saturation layer and set it to colorize. Selecting a blueish colour i lowered the saturation. I did this to give a slight bit of depth to image.
The Final Image
I am quite happy with the image. the perspective is still bothering me but in taking it further would mean a lot more reconstruction of the final image. I do like the black and white toning and the strong contrast together. Overall it is a nice image.
What do you think of the final image? Is there anything you would have done differently? or is there a process you want me to do in more detail in the future? Let me know using the comment box below.
Aperture64 