What Would You Do (#14)

[Nicole]

Back again for another week of What Would You Do?

I'm putting out a call for photos if people want the thread to continue (I've only got one more after this week). So, if you want your photo to be the subject of one of these threads, then send me a PM with a link to the medium and large size of the photo.

Now, on to this week's photo. It comes from Winterminute and the question is, how do you create a focal point in a very busy scene?



Available larger

Last week was great, and there were some really creative entries, so I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone would do with this picture. So have at it, and don't forget to post it back up along with what you did so that we can all learn from you.

[Nicole]

I actually really wanted to do something with this one because it reminded me of a photoshop tutorial that I'd read a while back... It was one on how to make your photo look like a movie still. So, what I came up with was this:


View larger

I'll just post the link to the tutorial that I used because I didn't make many changes to the steps that they show there. The only things I changed were that I added less noise, and I did a little bit of work in the sky because it looked very strange after one of the steps. I just liked how doing this put the focus more on a single point.

[shazzt]

Here is my humble attempt - again nothing fancy:

- Cropped the photo to portrait orientation to simplify the image
- Defogged it with the Unsharp filter
- Applied a high pass sharpen
- Added a slight vignette around the outside to contain the image more

[matthewchj]

Cropped it a bit, general tweaking with Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation and Levels. Despeckled it, applied Radial Blur to draw attention to the taxi, and then Unsharp Mask.

[shazzt]

Originally Posted by matthewchj

Cropped it a bit, general tweaking with Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation and Levels. Despeckled it, applied Radial Blur to draw attention to the taxi, and then Unsharp Mask.

That is cool - looks like a different photo!

[winterminute]

I'm always amazed how much can be done in the post-production step. Nicole, I wanted to look at large image but I don't have rights (and I'm a contact of yours), did you mark it public?

Thanks to everyone so far. As I said to Nicole, I love this image because it captures so much of the atmosphere of this street in Bangkok and really goes a long way to showing how it feels to be there, but to the average viewer it just looks busy and lack focus.

I can't wait to see more

[Nicole]

Originally Posted by winterminute

Nicole, I wanted to look at large image but I don't have rights

Should be fixed now, forgot to just link to the static jpg Sorry about that! (extra link to the picture so you don't have to scroll back up)

[jiminyClickit]

Looking for a hook, a small story as old as civilization appeared in the lower right quadrant. Girl-watching guys in a truck seemed worth highlighting with a dark mask layer over cropped copy of original. Moved taxi over to give a line-of-sight. Moved shopper over. Erasing parts of mask gives a suggestion of scattered sunlight, helping to direct attention to truck occupants and woman tourist. Some saturation, contrast just to liven it.

[xxpinballxx]

Great work Jiminy. The changes you made really improve the shot and still the shot looks straight from the camera. I like it. I can't think of anything to do with this one....trying to focus on one of the many signs or something....just to make it a bit different.

[Sime]

Went all color selective... and grey scaled out the rest, contrasted the grey and color seperately.

JC - amazing cloning skills!... great job.