Enlivening of a Throw-Away Shot in 21 Minutes

[Itanium]

Procedure:

Restrain yourself from hitting the delete key while sorting your shots from today on an image like below...



Take it on yourself that since you spent time shooting it and it looked worth it when you pressed shutter release on your camera, that you will now publish it no matter what.

So some random curve adjustments on the image to make picture look somewhat interesting.

Re-analyze that if everything is OK?

Reach to the conclusion that sky now looks fine but foreground lamp post is way too dark. So mask the correction on the lamp post and do a separate curves adjustment on the post.

And here you are now....



Click above for larger size and EXIF. Comments are welcome.

[Alex168]

Thats much better then the first shot if i can say so. I usualy spend some time at least playing around with the pictures that i ahve taken, sometimes they are just noth worth it so i do some crazy expermentation on it! this one turned out really nice

[Imed]

Of course, the second shoot is better

Good work

Regards

[wulf]

If I spent 21 minutes on every throwaway shot, I would never do anything except work on post-processing. I think there is a lot to be said for being careful about what you spend time on.

That said, this is a good illustration of how you can use post-processing skill to get a worthwhile result when you only have one shot of a scene that you really want to keep and it didn't turn out so great straight from camera.

Wulf

[bane]

Curves are a powerful tool, the result is much better than the original.

[rodrigo]

Great work, it shows how pretty much any picture has potential when well processed. I'm not a big fan of the borders tho

[Itanium]

Originally Posted by wulf

If I spent 21 minutes on every throwaway shot, I would never do anything except work on post-processing. I think there is a lot to be said for being careful about what you spend time on.

That said, this is a good illustration of how you can use post-processing skill to get a worthwhile result when you only have one shot of a scene that you really want to keep and it didn't turn out so great straight from camera.

Wulf

Ofcourse, one can't spend 21 minutes (or whatever ) on every shot they have taken but as you said yourself, its worth spending some time sometimes when you really want to keep a picture and the choices you have are not standing out well as it is. As someone said (some famous photog), taking the shot is just the beginning.

Originally Posted by rodrigo

I'm not a big fan of the borders tho

But I am Simple stroke and drop shadow make is separate from rest of the things around on the page, I believe.

Thanks for the comments and liking the picture ppl.

[richardpsic]

Good job! the new version looks much better with those simple fixes.

[markov]

wow! doesnt look anything like the first shot that you have! thats amazing!

[rbaezd]

You have achieved something better with this curves adjustment.
I would also try with some Hue/sat adjustments to tame a bit the saturation of the blues in the sky.