What’s Your Preference?

PhilUK · #1 (**permalink**) 08-24-2009, 02:00 PM

Hi everyone - my first post here, so I hope that I get it all right, but my apologies if I don't; feel free to point me in the right direction. I was at Leeds Castle in the UK, and it's slightly unusual in that you're allowed to take photographs of the interior. Unfortunately I was there on a busy day, so was rather rushed. I forget to reset my settings, so the first image that I took of a lovely wooden curving staircase was all wrong and quite badly blurred.

I was quickly able to snatch another picture, but this was just in automatic mode, so it's bleached out, there's too much wall in the way and it's quite frankly horrible.

However, I really wanted this shot, so decided to see if I could make something out of nothing. I used the second image as my background and added the blurred image as another layer. Then I matched them up as closely as I could do. I then cropped out the overexposed wall on the right, but this still left the rope and a nasty shadow.

I did a lot of cloning to get rid of the shadows, then cut, pasted and resized various sections of wall and stair to get rid of the rest of the shadows. I cloned out the electric light switch and cloned (at 50%) above the light switch to blend in the different wood.

Merged the two layers. I then used a filter with PaintShop Pro which is a pencil filter, and kept it very low to enhance the softness of the image and turn it slightly more into a drawing rather than a photograph. I also changed the saturation and temperature slightly to give it a warmer and richer feel. Finally added in a little noise to enhance the pencil feel and that was that. This is the finished product:

So the moral of the story is that if you get a blurred image, all is not necessarily lost!
EXIF data:
Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/4.5
Focal Length: 22 mm
ISO Speed: 400