Reserved

[xysmas]

Our regular circle of friends meets up every Wednesday evening at Chama River Brewing here in Albuquerque. I happened to bring my camera this week and got this from the interestingly lit patio. Thanks for your input in advance.

[jmadigan]

I like the idea and the depth of field with the guy in the background. Some things I would have done a little differently:

1. The image is WAY oversharpened.
2. There's dead space in the lower right, to the right of the salt. I'd have either cropped it out or moved the salt and pepper over to fill it in.
3. I'd have recomposed to have a little negative space between the guy in the background and the glass of water.

[clockdoc]

Hi,
I think you have provided a very interesting effect. I wasn't able to determine from your notes how you achieved it with Photoshop CS3. You have several images going all at once here and I found it difficult for my eye to land in any one place. The strongest composition , IMHO, is with the glass and salt& pepper shaker. The figure in the back as well as the "Reserved" sign don't necessarily add to the strength of the image. What does fascinate me is the refraction of some table imagery from the liquid in the glass. Perhaps some closer work with that would have produced some interesting effects. Thanks for sharing your work with us. Please tell us a little more about how you achieved your effect.
Sincerely,
Lee- 'clockdoc'

[xysmas]

The effect was made using a number of tools - high pass filtering, dodging, burning, blurring + resharpening, etc. The basic techniques for high pass contrast are around and can make an interesting effect. I used it to get the crazy reflection effect from the glass and salt & pepper. The amount of sharpening was intentional, but the detail from the reflection could not really be brought out much more than presented. I have another few shots from that similar angle that i have yet to play with, so we'll see what happens.

I do think the individual pepper flakes are too sharp - so i'll mask that out next time around for sure, just didn't think about it as much while making this. Thanks for your input.

[Nieton21]

another neat idea would be to line of the guy behind the wine glass and have hime projected through the glass and not on the side of it. It would balance out the sides nicely. I really like the crispness of the oversharpening it makes it feel surreal. I think if you put the guy behind the wine glass it would add to this surreal feal, because I think he grounds the image into a more normal world. Nice ps work though

Editwhoa...i'm a senior member now...I feel old.)