building, trees and clouds edit

[MattJohnRobinson]

Before

During

After



First a note about HDR for anybody just starting with it (this shot isn't HDR): I tried to add HDR to this by taking three exposures...however even by going down to -2EV, a good bit of the sky was still blown out, and I didn't realize it at the time. This happened to a couple different HDR shots I tried to do. So now I learned with HDR, always inspect the image thoroughly when you are shooting it to make sure you have completely eliminated all blow-outs and that you've lit up the darkest shadows--don't just assume that going to -2 and +2 EV will do the trick (like the majority of tutorials will tell you). Most of the time yeah that'll work, but not always.

For the before and after:

To get to the before, first cropped in. Rotated to get the top of the (background) train car 100% level; that took rotation tweaking to 0.1 degrees.This made it MUCH easier to adjust the levels/curves/contrast/exposure/noise/sharpness of the train and sky separately--generally bringing up the brightness and contrast of the train and bringing down the brightness of the sky. Because the train top was made a perfect horizontal line I just used the rectangular marquee and selected from the top down, made adjustments, then inverted the selection and made adjustments to the sky (an inverse S in the curves, mostly). I didn't need to edit any obvious selective editing lines because the line fell right on the line that is already created by the top of the train.

So, for the more tricky part. I don't actually like anything in particular about this image (actually I hate how I blew out the sky! I need a Grad ND filter) but I thought I would practice my editing and see how well I could remove that building and sign.

First I lasso'd the group of trees on the right, being sure to lasso a good bit of the sky above them, copied and pasted that. I drug that layer down until the top of the "Blue" sign was just underneath the top of the train car. Then I slid it to about 50% opacity so I could see both layers and used a very fine eraser to erase the part of the top layer that covered the train. Then I was at the middle image in the series.

To meld the line in the clouds I used the healing brush tool, continually reselecting its reference point along the line. Where the new layer merged with the trees to the left of it, I used the cloning tool to stamp out some of the real branches. At the junction between the two layers there was a disconnect in the color of the clouds, so I selectively adjusted the color balance to make the clouds in the new layer more yellow. Then I used the clone tool for colors in the immediate area to paint out the clouds a little more, and smoothed out the circumference of the clones with the healing brush.

At the end I did some minor dodging on the tower and selectively increased its contrast. Threw on a warming filter and then sharpened everything to my liking.