What Would You Do (#40)

[Nicole]

Wow! Up to number 40! That means only another 10 to go before we hit 50 which seems like a good number to celebrate. Granted, we could celebrate at 52 weeks when it's been a full year of WWYD.

This week's picture is from Sandie:



Available Larger

The rules are simple. Edit the photo, come back, show us, and tell us what you did. The telling us what you did part is especially good since that's how we all learn .

Now, if you'd like your picture to be used in one of these threads, don't be shy. Send me a PM with a link to the medium & large version of your picture (or at least a medium version of it). I use the pictures in the order that I get them, but I'm always happy to get new pictures to add to the queue. So, now, let's see what you would do!

[windrider86]

I dont know where this idea came ffrom but lackof sleep sometimes does amazing things to the brain.
So First I selected the magic wand and had the settings on mode,brightness, feather 20 and replace and selected all of the white sky areas and as much of around the chandalier as I could. Then took a picture of my grandson, copied and pasted into selection. I then duplicated the layer, desaturated and then erased the areas where i wanted colors. Duplicated layers again and adjusted the contrast to where I thought it was ok and then merged layers.

[Nicole]

I'll try to remember everything I've done on this one, I accidentally closed it after saving it .

First, I ran this Vintage Film Action
Then I duplicated the picture as a new layer and set it to Color Burn
Then I did a little dodging and burning on a layer filled with 50% grey and set to Overlay
Next I selected the sky area and created a new layer and set it to Color. I painted it with a blue tone, then adjusted the Hue / Saturation to make the blue look more washed out in line with the rest of the image.
Finally I used a high pass sharpening layer on the image.

I think that's everything

[wulf]

Not an incredibly exciting job on my part but I wanted to take part without spending too much time that I don't have

My steps, to create an early morning / twilight feel:

1. Minor rotation (the original seemed slightly skewed)

2. Adjusting white balance using the levels tool (reducing the output range from 0-255 to 7-248 and setting black, white and grey points by eye)

3. Using curves to increase the contrast and tweak the colours (I knew I was going to add a sky - this was where I decided to look for a golden one).

4. Creating a mask for the sky. Because the existing sky is so blown out this was fairly easy. I desaturated a copy of the image and then used the curves tool to get a fairly sharp contrast between foreground (black) and background (white). This leaves some grey, which creates a smoother transition - I touched up the mask using brush tools where unwanted grey was visible.

5. Pasting in a suitable sky from a photo of mine and applying the mask.

6. Applying a translucent orange layer in overlay mode, which helped integrate the colours of the two levels more smoothly.

I am reasonably pleased with the result although the masking is not perfectly precise, especially round the candles on the chandelier.

Wulf

[Sandie]

These are really cool! I only kept the image because it was kind of quirky, now I am getting inspired to play with it again.

[Nicole]

Originally Posted by Sandie

These are really cool! I only kept the image because it was kind of quirky, now I am getting inspired to play with it again.

You know, you can post those edits in this thread

[Caterwaul]

Here's my take-



1) Brightened highlights, darkened midtones and shadows in the RGB channel of curves

2) Second curves layer- reduced the cap on highlights in the red channel, boosted red midtones to make the chandelier pop

3) Cropped to remove most of the sky and the brick building and keep the whole background blue tinted

4) Copy/pasted the image and its mirror into a new document, lined them up and cropped the excess space

[Sandie]

Originally Posted by Nicole

You know, you can post those edits in this thread

Yes, I know I can post them, and I plan on posting at least one, but right now I am still pretty embarassed by my attempts. I chose this picture for this game because I was hoping to learn how to replace the sky and so I am playing with Wulf's and Windrider's ideas.

It really is different when it is your own picture

[wulf]

Originally Posted by Caterwaul

I loved the mirrored effect because of the way it makes the chandelier support into such a strong geometric shape but I didn't like the "crease" down the mirror line. I did a quick try, enlarging the canvas and using the perspective distortion tool to make that line of stones vertical before adding a mirrored copy. I also did a little colour balancing using the levels tool (similar to what I did before but more subtle).

If I had time, I could see this developing into some kind of album cover (I would probably want to do some work on the buildings to make them look less obviously mirrored and maybe put a band playing on top of the floating platform).

Wulf

[jujitsu1]

Had a lot of help doing this one from a photoshop learn it now cd that i had free with novembers mags . the video was done by Chris Robinson so credit to him too.
Heres the picture :

Things I did :
Made new layer removed the sky. Desat the rest of the buildings . added the moon. Burnt the buildings to look abit darker. added the clouds . High lighted some of the windows and parts of the buildings to look like the moon was hitting it . added abit of mixed yellow to look like some of the candles and lights where on .