The Horror Film Effect

[auer1816]

Before:


During:


After:


How I Did It:
The first thing I did was crop it square. It was shot landscape, but there was just extra nothing on the right side of the building, so I cut it out to frame the building a little better. After that, I converted to black & white using the Photoshop CS2 Channel Mixer (didn’t have CS3 at the time) with 25% green and 75% blue. Then I did a levels adjustment by bringing the white point down to about 168 in order to brighten the building up a bit. I also created a layer mask at this point that separated the sky from the rest of the image so I could work on each one separately. So the first levels adjustment was just applied to the building. Then I used the same layer mask to apply a curves adjustment to the building. I adjusted the curve to a very harsh “S� curve to really bring out the contrast in the brickwork. Then I inverted the layer mask and applied it to a levels adjustment for the sky. Since there wasn’t much contrast in the sky to begin with, I had to bring the black point up to 170 and the white point down to 222. Then I applied a curves adjustment to the sky with another strong “S� curve to boost the contrast. Since the sky didn’t have a lot of contrast to begin with, my adjustments forced a lot of noise to become apparent in the sky. I considered trying to fix it, but I think it adds to the mood so I left it alone. The last thing I did was add vignette to the photo to darken the corners and boost the mood. And of course, a bit of sharpening at the end — though this photo didn’t need much because of the already high contrast.

See more on how and where I took the photo at the Epic Edits Weblog.

[Nicole]

Thanks for the How-to on your before and after Very interesting read. I like the end product a lot because of the very dramatic contrast. BTW, I added a link to this in the post-processing tutorial lists

[jiminyClickit]

auer1816,

Spoooooky! This is one I could follow, and get good results. Well done.

[wulf]

I like the "during" image - a very useful addition. I'll have to remember that next time I'm working on a "before and after" contribution!

Wulf

[kunaldaswani]

Great work wulf! Thanks for sharing!

[auer1816]

Thanks everybody!

Wulf - I'm glad you like the "during" image. It's not too hard to put together as long as you save your Photoshop files and don't do any destructive editing. I basically just started at the bottom of the layer stack and turned on one at a time while doing a "copy merged layers" and dumping it into a new file.

[mdwsta4]

awesome work. turned a 'blah' shot into something real cool looking. nice tutorial as well.

[Saralonde]

Thanks, Brian, this was really well done. Gives me hope for some of my ordinary photographs!

[roccstar2]

Hey, this is really neat. I love the sky and clouds, really gives the feel of something scary and terrifying!

[CyberF828]

That is awesome I like doing the same things.