Sharper Glass

[wulf]

I work in a department based in the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford. The main hospital building is very new and has a fantastic glass atrium for the main entrance. Here is a shot I took of it earlier this week:



That is okay and captures the internal and external structures I was after but I think it looks better after a couple of minutes work with The Gimp:



What did I do?

1. Rotation. There isn't an obvious line that should be set vertical or horizontal so I judged this one by eye. I then cropped down to avoid the blank spaces left along the edges of the image - I didn't want to have to try and paint missing sections back in by hand.

2. I created a duplicate layer and set it to overlay mode. This increases the contrast and I rolled the opacity down to keep things relatively subtle. It's an easy, quick boost. I merged this with a copy of the original.

3. Next came the curves tool. How I approach this depends very much on the image. Here I noticed that the image was slightly underexposed for each channel, so I worked on each one, pulling the top right point to the edge of clipping and adjusting the central point to balance the colours. I also put a couple of tweaks onto the overall values curve.

4. Finally, I resized the image down a bit (I like standard ratios and neat lengths, so this is 3:2 at 2700x1800px) and applied some smart sharpening.

Wulf

[peeperita]

Originally Posted by wulf

3. Next came the curves tool. How I approach this depends very much on the image. Here I noticed that the image was slightly underexposed for each channel, so I worked on each one, pulling the top right point to the edge of clipping and adjusting the central point to balance the colours. I also put a couple of tweaks onto the overall values curve.

Wulf

i learn something new from you with every before and after.....an intriguing technique i must try soon.....

i don't suppose you have a screen shot to illustrate this, do you?

thanks

peeper

[wulf]

No, but I could try to get one. Might be a few days though.

Wulf

[wulf]

Here's another, very similar pair of shots, from another building at work:





I'm not sure if the curves thing I was talking about is that significant. I didn't do it here and still got a similar result.

Wulf

[Chip]

Thanks, wulf. I like the way you accomplish subtle but meaningul PP effects.

What do you mean by "smart sharpening" in your step #4? Is that a high pass filter, or something else?

[wulf]

Yes - a high pass effect (see here for more details).

Wulf

[Chip]

Originally Posted by wulf

Yes - a high pass effect (see here for more details).

Wulf

Thanks. I memorized the steps in your tutorial months ago.