Revisit and Retouch Response
Ryan, over at CameraPorn (yes, it's SFW), came up with a very cool exercise. He posted three pictures he'd taken of a fuel depot in Grand Caymen. The three pictures are all of the same scene, each 2 stops apart. He composited them in Photoshop, making a very nice image. Now here's the cool part: he's inviting his readers to take their own shot at doing the composite, and he'll post all submissions. Since I'm looking to improve my Photoshop skills, this seemed like a cool thing to try. First, Ryan's composite. And here's my take on it:
As part of the exercise, he asked us to show how we did it. The best way I can think of is to show my layers and explain:
First, the base layer is the 0EV shot. Layer 1 is the +2EV shot, and has some nice detail in the foreground and rocks. Layer 2 is the -2EV shot and has a good sky in it. You can see these two are masked to keep from contaminating each other. Next is a Hue/Saturation layer that just brings the saturation up +50 on the whole image. A Curves layer above that adds contrast with a strong S-curve, masking out the top left to keep the sky from going too dark.
Layer 3 is a touch up layer that removes all the dust spots that got on the lens because of the sea spray. Curves 2 drops the Blue channel slightly and brings up the Green channel to give a warmer cast to the image. Hue/Saturation 2 shifts the yellows more towards red, to give a nice orange glow, but is masked to keep the oranges on the left of the image from saturating too much. Hue/Saturation 3 tones down the Reds by decreasing their saturation. Finally, Hue/Saturation 4 removes a blue cast on the fuel tanks.
I'm pretty happy with the image. It's a drastically different photograph from the base image:
Sometimes I wonder if it's too saturated, but when I tried to tone it down, it lost its punch. My only real problem with it was getting the horizon right. You can see the water is a little dark and the sky a little bright where they meet, but after spending too much time on it, I just decided it was good enough.
You can also check out other people's entries so far.
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