After Before Forum; One Photo Focus Loré

This weeks “After and Before Forum” is sponsored by Loré at Snow’s Fissures and Fractures and today is March’s one photo focus. Usually the “After and Before forum” is a post where we share an image before and after editing and share how we get the wow in out photographs. One post a month av member of the forum gives us all a photo to edit. In previous editions I have edited  Emilio’s Old Truck picture and Manal’s street scene.

Upon opening Loré’s picture I wasn’t sure how to tackle this picture, there were many different approaches but none seemed right. In the end I decided to edit the picture with the idea of why I would take such a picture.
I imagined being in an Italian café on holiday and seeing the geometric pattern of the tables arranged around the statue. I am sure at that moment I would have whipped out my phone taken a picture for Instagram.

Of course for the forum I wouldn’t share an Instagram edit; I did though started to like the idea of a square crop and some kind of vintage toning.

I cropped the image to a square format using the guides to help create a balanced composition.

I then cleaned away distracting elements in the background; the chair, sign, fire hydrant and the pole. I did this by using the pen tool to select the chair and the sign to create a selection, and filled the selection with a content aware fill. I used the patch tool to remove the fire hydrant and the pole. I made these adjustments on a separate layer, duplicated and merged them together to create a clean copy.

I wanted to create the Instagram style and a kind of image. I thought a lomo look would fit quite nicely. I duplicated my clean copy layer and set the blending to overlay.

I then created a curves adjustment to brighten the whole image.

I created a channel mixer adjustment layer. I went to the blue channel and reduced the blue slider to +90. This has the effect of adding a creamy yellow tone to the highlights.

I needed to create a vignette. I selected the whole canvas and modified the border by 200px (select-modify-border), I then inverted the selection and modified the feather to 100px (select-modify-feather) and filled the selection on a new layer with black. I set the blending to multiply and reduced the opacity to 70. I duplicated the vignette layer and set the new layer’s blending to overlay. I created a folder and put both vignette layers inside. I then adjusted the opacity of the folder to make the vignette blend with the whole image.

For me the image wasn’t vintage enough, I decided to add a half sepia tone to add a bit of age to the image.

I added a hue and saturation adjustment layer setting; hue to 25 and saturation to 25. I set the blending to hue.

I then created a gradient map choosing a light blue for the shadows and an orange/yellow for the highlights and set the blending to overlay.

The image felt a little too smooth and clean, I decided to add some noise for texture. I created a new layer and filled it with 50%grey and converted it to a smart object. I used a smart object because I would be applying filters to this layer and if I wanted to come back and tweak them I could. If I used a normal layer tweaking the noise effect would mean starting this step from the beginning again.

I first applied a noise filter with a low setting and then blurred the noise with a small Gaussian blur.

I felt I had lost details in the face of the statue and burnt the detail back in (new layer, 50% grey, black brush low opacity)

I sharpened the image with high pass sharpening. I selected the original clean copy layer and moved it to the top. I applied a high pass filter (set to 10) and then set the layer’s blending to overlay. I didn’t want to sharpen the whole image so I added a layer mask (hide all) and painted white to only add sharpening to the statue and plant.

I added a finishing touch with a frame. In this case I used a medium format film frame to add to the vintage effect. Something I did add since sending the file to Stacy was a drop shadow to the frame to make it blend in a bit more.

Overall I like the editing; it has the Instagram, faux vintage feel that I was going for. I feel the crop and the cleaning makes the statue more the focus of the image and the warm tones add a feeling of a pleasant memory.

What do you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Also remember to check out how other members of the forum have interpreted this image.

If you would like to take part in the forum you can do so and find out more information here.

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