News and Views from Dave Wilson

Editing Phill Price’s Photo

by on Feb.21, 2009, under Photography

Phill Price, a photographer from London whose blog I follow, has issued an “Edit My Photo” challenge and placed one of his images into the hands of readers to see what they can come up with. I had a few minutes to play so here are my results. First, however, the original image:



I really like this image in its original form but, since I had to do something with it, here are the two versions I ended up with. If you’ve seen some of my other architecture images, you probably know that I enjoy high contrast and dramatic tone so the look of these will probably not surprise you much.




Both are derived from basically the same Photoshop file with the mono version merely desaturating the colour one. Starting with the original CR2 raw file that Phill provided, here’s what I did to get to each of the final images:

  1. Open the RAW in Photomatix and run the tone mapper on it to generate the basic image with rather more dramatic contrast and sky texture.
  2. Take the Photomatix output into Photoshop CS3 and also open the original CR2 file too.
  3. Run a High Pass filter on the original raw image and add this as a layer with Overlay blending to the Photomatix output. This strongly exagerates the contrast in the building.
  4. Add a layer mask to the High Pass layer and remove areas corresponding to the sky (to reduce noise which was increased by the high pass treatment).
  5. Add a curves adjustment layer to dramatically darken the image and paint gradients into its layer mask to affect the sky, darkest at the top left and fading out to the centre.
  6. Add a masked Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and paint out the red lamp on the front of the building which I found distracting.
  7. Add another curves adjustment layer to tweak the overall contrast upwards a bit.
  8. Add a final curves adjustment layer and layer mask to vignette the bottom and right edges very slightly.
  9. For the mono version, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and pull the saturation down to 0. Normally, I would use the channel mixer for this but the basic saturation removal yielded an image whose tonality I was happy with so I left it at that.

Of the two, I definitely prefer the monochrome version since, to me, this is predominantly a shape picture. What do you think?

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