Before & After: Cathedral of San Marco, Venice
Posted on January 22, 2016
Sometimes you can’t get exactly the shot you want and need to rely on post-processing to realise your original idea.
Before
This was taken in Saint Mark’s Square in Venice and is of the side of the Cathedral. It’s always crowded there, so for every kind of reason it makes no sense to be packing a long zoom lens. I was interested in the detail of the recess in the centre of the image, but this was the closest that my 24-70mm zoom lens could get.
After
The first actions to take were to straighten the image and crop out all distractions – notably the scaffolding. It also allowed for an aesthetically attractive symmetry in the final image.
As can be seen from the shadows in the original image, the sun was shining very brightly and it was close to noon, so the whole image looks ‘bleached’. Fiddling with the overall exposure didn’t produce any helpful results, but taking down the Highlights, Shadows and Whites sliders brought out a lot more subtle detail in the stonework and also had some positive impact on the colours.
However, I resorted to the individual colour adjustments to reach this final version. I boosted the Saturation of the three principal colours – orange, yellow and blue – but by trial and error I found that a greater impact was made by adjusting the Luminance – increasing orange and yellow, reducing blue.
Spiral steeple
Posted on January 21, 2016
Cee’s Black & White challenge this week is anything that begins with the letter ‘S’. So how about the spiral steeple of St Saviour’s church in the town of Rochechouart? Shown against the sky.
Thursday Doors: Home (before and after)
Posted on January 21, 2016
This week we’re not just close to home; we’re at home. We bought what you could reasonably describe as a ‘doer-upper’ back in 2005. It was, as the agent’s particulars stated, in trés mauvais état – a very bad state.
This was the back door leading into what is now the kitchen:
Inside there was a tree growing out of the wall where the log-burning stove now sits. The whole interior has been effectively rubbed out and started again. We’ve also made a few changes to the exterior:
Thursday Doors 21 January 2016
Weekly Photo Challenge: Alphabet
Posted on January 16, 2016
As soon as I saw this week’s challenge, I knew exactly which image I wanted to use. From the windowsill in my grandsons’ bedroom:
Before & After: Petra
Posted on January 15, 2016
Petra is arguably one of the most photographed places on Earth (right up there with Venice) and I’ve posted a number of the pictures I took there on this blog. And here’s another, which I’ve used for this latest exercise in ‘before and after’.
Before
The original is a pretty bog-standatd shot of part of the famous al-Khazneh (Treasury) building which is the first thing you see when you enter Petra. As it stands it’s pretty ho-hum – the photo, not the Treasury – but I thought it might be possible to make something a little more arresting with some post-processing.
After
The first thing to do was straighten the image. After that, I cropped out the grey rock on the left, to focus on the juxtaposition of the angular and circular features (which I thought contrasted well with each other).
The original image seemed to me to be a little over-exposed, so I adjusted for that in the whole image. A particular problem area was the dome on top of the circular feature. I brought out some additional detail in that by adding a graduated filter on the right hand side of the image – an innovation for me: I knew Lightroom offered such a thing but had never worked out how to use it. I got it eventually through trial and error.
After that, it was simply a matter of adding some Punch and Sharpening to give the image a bit more ‘presence’. Overall, I think the editing has made for an improvement.
The Lantern
Posted on January 14, 2016
For this week’s subject of ‘Lights’, here is a traditional lantern that hangs over the terrace of the Royal Villa (boy, was that ever a free upgrade) at the Sir Baniyas Hotel in Abu Dhabi. The shadow is a bonus.
Thursday Doors: Sarlat (again)
Posted on January 14, 2016
Just over a month ago, I posted a picture of what are inarguably the biggest doors in Sarlat. By contrast, this is quite likely the smallest.
Symmetry
Posted on January 13, 2016
Something in the human brain is attracted to symmetry; we find it – almost always – aesthetically pleasing. And, as Cee points out this week, it can appear in many different guises.
To begin with, here are two images from the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. The first is yet another (no apologies though) chandelier, pictured from below, which is an example of circular symmetry, while the second is the top of a dome, which is obviously an example of left/right symmetry.
Although symmetry is an important element of Islamic art, it also features extensively in secular situations in Arab countries. Here is part of the seawall on the Abu Dhabi Corniche and – more prosaically – the underground carpark of the Dubai Mall.
It’s also possible to see symmetry in multiple subjects: like these two conjoined kites from the Blond airshow and a set of measuring jugs from a museum in Sarlat.
And finally, the symmetry of reflections on the Dordogne River
Weekly Photo Challenge: Weight(less)
Posted on January 9, 2016
Before & After: Sunset
Posted on January 8, 2016
Sunsets can be highly dramatic subjects, but they can also be the devil’s own work to get right, because the sun itself is almost inevitably over-exposed and leaves everything else devoid of detail.
Before
This photograph was taken at dusk, looking over the giraffe enclosure of the nature reserve on Sir Bani Yas island. Capturing it was pretty much a case of point and click – the sun sets very quickly so close to the tropics. As it stands, it’s not a bad image, but I thought it would be interesting to see what could be done in the way of post-processing to improve it.
After
- Although it works reasonably well with the sun slap bang in the middle of the picture, I cropped so as to put it on one of the classic ‘rule of thirds’ intersections.
- In the process, this also eliminated much of the dark foreground, which didn’t contain anything of interest. It also brings to the fore the bare silhouetted branches that are the really interesting element of the image.
- Hovering the magnifying glass in Lightroom’s Develop mode over the brightest part of the sun’s disc confirmed that it was completely blown out, with all three of the Red, Green and Blue readings at 100%, or as near as makes no difference. Moving the Whites slider all the way to -100 actually reduced this figure to around 75%, which is at least some improvement.
- I also played around a bit with the Orange channel in the colour palette top provide a warmer overall cast.
By the way, did anybody else spot the bird sitting on the branch (at about 7 o’clock if the sun was a clockface)? I didn’t see it at all until I’d completed the editing.
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