Cityscape---how to get more colors

[smk305]

I know pretty much nothing about photography. I teach in the city and my favorite thing about the row houses across from my school are all the bold and pretty colors. I took this picture and it looks much more faded and less pretty than in real life. How can I take this again with better colors or how could I take it again with a more interesting perspective? I would rather have the yellow house be the focus of the photo.

[navcom]

The best way to find a good composition is to move around. Try different perspectives, angles, different focal lengths, get real high, get real low, get real close, etc. Look for lines and objects that lead the viewer in (roof lines, streets, textures that make the viewer take notice, arrangement of objects and colors, etc.)

Also, try to limit your photo composition to items that add to the picture. It's a fine balance...too much stuff in the photo and it becomes overwhelming and confusing...too little and you lose the context and the viewers interest. Determine what you want your subject to be and then include items that add to your subject. If it doesn't attract the viewer to the subject, consider leaving it out by zooming/moving closer or reposition your shot.

Your location has tons of possibilities. Now get out there and find them!

Hope that helps!

[wal]

Nice pic, real colorfull row of houses.. but i cant help noticing the slanting horizon. Should avoid that when taking landscapes. Try add more contrast / saturating a bit more in post processing, probably that will help.

[ressalg]

Just a side note: The picture is really large in your post. It and your text are getting covered up by the banner ad on the side.

[windrider86]

By including your exif information we could possibly give you alternate camera settings to help you along your way!

[navcom]

Wow Michelle!! That avatar is something else! For some reason I'm tripping back to a Grateful Dead concert right now....

[SriMesh]

You are right there is lots of architectural detail, and colours in this scene! Where abouts in the universe are you located? I am over here in Canada. Only with photography, have I been attracted to urban settings, I had previously thought that I preferred natural landscapes, and would have nothing to do with cityscapes, but they do have a lot of interest also.

I thought at first that if all the rest of the photo were black and white, and your yellow areas highlighted only that would help, but I didn't like it too much. I hope you don't mind, but I added my following experiment (click on small image to see larger image if you want to)...

On the way to doing the above, I levelled the horizon of your photo. By levelling the horizon, the foreground fence provided a diagonal line of interest. The eye likes the junctions of the rule of thirds, so I would place your yellow house on the side "rule of thirds", but that would need to affect the cars, vanishing point lines and layouts of the photo, etc. So, I converted the yellow house to black and white, and gave a different row house yellow awnings with yellow fill layer masks and used a 50% vector mask to bring forward the original shading.. At this time I masked the yellow awnings, inverted and removed saturation to black and white except for the awnings, and that didn't look like I hoped for. I duplicated the background layer three times, adding with the transparency level set to lighten, then screen, then screen again. I used the vector mask to bring back the original layer of the sky once, and perhaps, should have kept the sky the original darkness with each layer. I linked the layers together and adjusted the colour layers as well. I then added a fine black and then a fine yellow border to enhance the yellow rowhouse. All this in photoshop. A similar effect can be done with capturing your image more than one time with different exposures, and then layering them at various transparencies to bring out the strength in each various exposure setting.

[smk305]

oh wow! That is so cool! Thank you for all of your advice. SriMesh I love the way you edited the picture! I don't know how to get exif information....how do I do that? Now I want to retake the picture with the yellow house as the main focus but I'm in Philadelphia and we are currently buried under 3 feet of snow.

[windrider86]

I see you use Flickr. Normally you can look to the right of your image and you'll see the words More Properties if you click on that it will tell you all the camera settings you used. But, on this one it does not so you may have done some processing on it all ready to have erased that info.
Other times you can right click on it and click properties on your computer screen, that will sometimes tell you as well.
Or, in your processing software you can usually find uner image information.
Hope that helps

[smk305]

I did use flickr to crop the picture. I guess that's why I couldn't find it. I think I found it on my computer though. Thanks again!:

Dimensions: 3050 x 2033
Device make: EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY
Device model: KODAK EASYSHARE M340 Digital Camera
Color space: RGB
Color Profile: Camera RGB Profile
Focal length: 6.3
Alpha channel: No
Red eye: No
F number: 5.6
Exposure time: 1/500