THE PP GAME!

Cheers Nick - pretty much what I expected the radial filter might do.

This looks familiar Phil ;)
 
overbez said:
This looks familiar Phil ;)
Click to expand...

You could be right ;) I've just searched for the the original thread ......you have a very good memory Graham :D

Could I also ask, the image in your avatar and the hands drawing the cuffs in your 52 thread, is that done with layers? I don't know how to do layers myself, but I like the affect in the images. Its something I'd like to learn :)
 
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Phil-D said:
, is that done with layers?
Click to expand...

Absolutely Phil... layers, and layer masks. Which just allow you to paint over part of the layer, without removing it completely.

The hand one was 5 (or maybe 6) separate images, load all into PS as separate layers. select the background in each with the magic wand tool, delete, then resize, rotate, layer mask the remaining hands to fade the join between, repeat as required. (y)


And for the tower.....

Made 3 exposures in ViewNX2
WB set to 2350
Sharpening 2
everything else 0

-2, 0 and +2 EV Export as TIFF
Load into SNS-HDR
play with sliders as required to blend where the dark and lights are, as well as highlights and shadows and local contrast

Export to PS still as TIFF
Clone over the blown highlights as I couldn;t retrieve them
Using Darken blend mode
Copied, resized, rotated some clouds t the left of the tower - this time using lighten blend mode

Click for big - small one needs more sharpening.
 
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LR 5.3:

aAdAwp1.jpg



PS CC:

  • Loads of cloning and healing to bring back the very over exposed tower.. it was beyond recovery any other way. I wanted to keep the effect that it was "glowing" though, so small details have been allowed to stay white, and I've selectively reduced clarity on those using small radial filters, and all cloned layers reduced back 40% with opacity.
  • Plane trail removed
  • Very top of tower masked off and radial filter applied to reduce blue saturation, reduce clarity, and again, to retain the effect of glowing bright instead of over-saturated/exposed blue light.
  • Black and white adjustment layer created, with heavy filtration on blues, yellows and oranges, and opacity reduced to 50%
  • Saturation layer created to bring colour levels back, but held yellow back to reduce sodium lighting colour cast.
  • Selective dodge and burning of foreground details on a soft light blended grey layer
  • Flatten
  • 8bit
  • sRGB
  • JPEG quality 12.
30 mins

Click for big etc.
 
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Hi everyone, it looks like being the odd one out again. I love the eerie look, the colours are so warm and I do like a bit of warm. The only thing detracting from the warmth is the headstone in the foreground, that will have to go.

My edit.
Open in ACR no adjustments, open in PS.
Straighten image with an arbitrary cw rotation of 0.25 degrees to bring the tower to vertical.
Crop, copy layer.
Fill in some of the burnout on the tower by making selections, copy and pasting the selections into new layers, moving them into place and blending in by transforming, flipping and altering the opacity.
Flattened when it looked OK.
SAVE.
Now for that pesky headstone, I couldn’t fathom a decent way to get rid of it, so I changed the colour to make it blend in better.
I selected the headstone with quick select, contracted by two pixels and feathered by two pixels then replaced the colour in image adjustments.
Deselect.
Flatten; apply a very slight adjustment in levels.
SAVE.
New layer fill with 50% gray and change the blending mode to soft light. With a soft round brush set to low values, dodge and burn using black to burn and white to dodge.
Flatten.
Select all and using stroke, apply a border.
SAVE.
Save for web.


CLIKFUBIGANBIGGER.

Rhodese.
 
Happy New Year y'all!
Been busy over last two weeks so have missed the PP challenge, it's good to be back.
This one opened OK in ACR and didn't need to be converted with DNG converter.
Here's the screen grab.........
View attachment 3445
I had an idea that I was going to convert it to monochrome with Silver Efex so I backed off all the highlights and blacks and boosted up the clarity in ACR.
Opened in PS and ran Silver Efex.
Not much to do really, the structure slider was pushed to 75% and then I used a blue filter at 30%.
Saved and returned to PS
Selected the tower and inverted it ( turned it into negative)
Then in the background layer i.e. everything except the tower, I made a layer mask and using a black/white gradient restored some colour.
I wanted a supernatural effect with a sort of misty background.

Click for larger

Wainhouse tower 1 by Farmejim, on Flickr
 
Well not a lot of entries, I'd like to say it makes picking a winner easier, but it doesn't :thinking:

The tower was slightly :whistle: blown on this one and I was interested to see what could be achieved.

Graham, you've got the look of the tower I was after. Getting the detail back in the brick work I like, I'm impressed (y)

Then Jim turned up with his edit and threw a spanner in the works :LOL:

I would have never thought of doing that (actually I couldn't do that :LOL:).......but it works, I like it(y).

There looks to be good detail in the tower but you missed a bit of the sky, right hand side at the top (noticed it on the biggest viewable image on flickr :D)

So......it was a close call, but Jim, with his unusual edit, is PP king this round.......well done Jim :clap: .......over to you :)

Here's my edit.......if only I could get the detail Graham got in the tower ........maybe one day :LOL:

Bit of a crop down right, clone out the small twig like trees either side of the tower and what was still there after the crop

Edit :- forgot, I got rid of that damn plane too :D


Wainhouse tower pp game edit by Phil D 245, on Flickr
 
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Well done Jim - nice one.

Phil - I didn;t retrieve that much highlight info - below is my dark version that I then blended with a mid exposure and a bright version...
I cloned over most of the highlights - I did mean to drop the opacity of the cloned layer to allow some of the white back through, but forgot, and I'm glad everyone was kind enough to not mention I duplicated the shadow under the top slit window to further down! :oops: :$

nt83.jpg


Often I find that if I pull back the exposure to retrieve highlights, there is not enough Shadow recovery left to bring the dark areas up. In these situations I tend to resort to blending multiple exposures from the single RAW file, as I did here.
 
Jim I'm glad to see you've won with something a little different - different is good sometimes
animated-smileys-crazy-023.gif


So a very well done
animated-smileys-drinking-005.gif
 
overbez said:
Well done Jim - nice one.

Phil - I didn;t retrieve that much highlight info - below is my dark version that I then blended with a mid exposure and a bright version...
I cloned over most of the highlights - I did mean to drop the opacity of the cloned layer to allow some of the white back through, but forgot, and I'm glad everyone was kind enough to not mention I duplicated the shadow under the top slit window to further down! :oops: :$

Often I find that if I pull back the exposure to retrieve highlights, there is not enough Shadow recovery left to bring the dark areas up. In these situations I tend to resort to blending multiple exposures from the single RAW file, as I did here.
Click to expand...


Graham, thanks for explaining. :)
I must've been having a blonde moment when I was studying your edited image
images


I'd not noticed that you'd duplicated the shadow under the top slit and I studied it more than once. :D

I was certainly impressed with the detail in the tower though:)
 
Thanks everyone and Phil-D, great honour :) I'll have to dig something up now.... hmmmm?
 
Where did the last message go? Try again:)

Thanks Phil and the rest of you. A great honour has been bestowed on me and I'll try and dig something up.

Edit... I'm uploading but don't hold your breath... upload speed this a.m. seems to be a dizzying 18kb/s:eek:
 
Right-o my beauties, here's a bin shot from my X10. I've uploaded the RAW and the JPEG so you can use either or both if you're feeling ambitious.
I'll be very interested to see the results. Up till now I can't say that spending time fiddling with Fuji RAW shots has worth the time and effort, so........Good luck!
Shall we say Saturday morning? If it looks like there's no more and you're all OK we can call it earlier.

First the Flickr, click for larger

DSCF3396 by Farmejim, on Flickr

RAW http://speedy.sh/8VbYJ/DSCF3396.RAF
Full size JPEG http://speedy.sh/qdGa2/DSCF3396.JPG
 
Not had a go for a while so here you Go...(even tho you never win if you go first :))

Pulled down highlights in raw
Had a play with intensify pro (available in the macheist bundle with a load of other software for £19.99 plus 10% goes to charity!)
reduced noise
toned with curves,



10 mins top mainly playing with the new software :)
 
Bravo Jim old chap, spot on what. :clap:

I agree about the Fuji jpegs, they are fine.

On to my edit.
I used the jpeg, opened in ACR, auto, opened in PS.
Copy layer.
Make a selection of the unburned face of the tower, above the hawthorn. Its shape was similar to the over lit area but opposite. Copied and pasted the selection into a new layer then flipped it horizontally, then moved it over the burned out area. Resized and shaped it to fit using the transform options.
Added a mask to the selection layer and removed the unwanted bits.
Flatten.
Import one of my stock skies, then merged it in by changing the blend to multiply.
Add a mask, blend, and remove the unwanted sky.
Flatten.
Clone over the hot spot at the bottom.
Used content aware and clone to loose the Finger, “tut tut”. ;)
Dodge and burn.
New layer, select all, use stroke and fx for border, reduce opacity.
SAVE.
Save for web.
FIN.


CLICK 4 BIG.

Rhodese.
 
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TheDrift- said:
Not had a go for a while so here you Go...(even tho you never win if you go first :))
Click to expand...
Don't you believe it Shaun, anybody can win this, it's just down to the biggest bribe:)
 
Rhodese said:
Used content aware and clone to loose the Finger, “tut tut”. ;)
Click to expand...

I'll have you know sir that that finger was there for a very important reason.........er, er .......Oh yes, to complement the colour of the rose-hips:oops: :$
 
Farmerjim said:
I'll have you know sir that that finger was there for a very important reason.........er, er .......Oh yes, to complement the colour of the rose-hips:oops: :$
Click to expand...

As if, made I smile. :)

Rhodese.
 
In Lightroom

White balance: Temp 5214, Tint +15
Shadows +12, Whites +26, Blacks -6
Clarity +10, Vibrance +5

Mild S-Curve

Transform vertical -33, Rotate +1.0

Crop

High opacity cloning to take a branch out of the sky.
Low opacity cloning to put a bit of texture into the bright side of the tower.
(Done in Lightroom as an exercise, to see if I could. I suspect it would have been much easier and quicker in CS, although that said the more I practice with Lightroom's cloning I find I can do more with it than I previously thought possible.)

Adjustment brush on bright side of the tower, using two selections.
Selection 1, all of the bright area: Exposure -0.57, Highlights -52, Saturation -59, Colour H79, S28 (low intensity yellowy green).
Selection 2, Triangular bottom half of the bright area: Saturation -48

5 Radial Filters
Mainly on church, above top fence rail: Clarity 12
Mainly on bright area on tower: Exposure -0.38, Highlights -100
Mainly on bush and fence to the left of the church: Highlights -100, Shadows -79, Saturation +79
Mainly area below top fence rails: Exposure -0.09, Highlights -93
Mainly on the grassy area above the bottom right fence rail: Exposure +0.15, Saturation +31

Pass across to CS2 as 16-bit tiff in ProPhoto RGB colour space

Skew the windows on the right below the top fence rail to make them more vertical.
Warp the bottom right hand corner to fill in a gap left by vertical adjustments, rotation and crop in Lightroom.

Clone a little colour into the small bright areas on the crenelations on top of the tower to the left of the bright area.

Smart Sharpen Amount 19%, Radius 1. (Not my normal sharpening, because this time rather than processing to 1100 pixels high I thought I would leave the image full size as seems to be quite popular for these (wonderfully instructive) exercises.)


NOT MY IMAGE - FarmerJim - Church - DSCF3396-Edit-2-Edit skewWaClSS19x1.0 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
Here is my entry:

View attachment 3535

Opened in light room
straitened and cropped
exposure lowered
contrast boosted
highlights lowered
shadows recovered
clarity boosted
sharpened
red and green vibrance increased, yellow decreased
split tone added to warm the highlights and cool the shadows.
slight vignette added
Done :D
 
Opened in Lightzone - as the only program that would do it!

Exposure down
Relight tool to tweak shadows and highlights
Increase detail
local contrast adjustment (small radius) to increase detail on fence mainly

PS
Couldn;t retrieve any sky :(, so I made my own :)
Clone out loopy branch
had a bit in the top right
so copied this, flipped horizontal, transform, layer with darken blend mode to top left
cloning, copying, dodging, burning
Convert to B&W

Back in Lightzone
Split toning with Orangey red to shadows
and yellowy orange to highlights
Slight crop top and bottom.

Picasa
Light vignette colour sampled from sky
Film Grain

Click for big.
 
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I haven't joined in for a while, so I thought I'd have a go :)

All done in PS...
Played with the levels
Cloned out the distracting branches
Cropped to square
Detail extractor (color efex pro)
Tried to sharpen church a bit

ermm, that's all I can remember ahah - I need to take notes text time! :LOL:


Post Processing Game by joshwainwrightphotography, on Flickr
 
A fine set of entries so far, well done every-one:clap: You lot have made my job difficult. Anymore for anymore?
Is it OK to call it later this P.M.? About 5 o'clock would be good for me.
 
Don't think there will be any more entries now so on with the judging..................

It's my personal take on this so hope I don't upset anyone with my critique. I was hoping that the church would be straightened and the dangling twig on top of the tower would be cloned out also that the burnt out tower on the right could be retrieved and that there would be plenty of detail in the post and rails.

The Drift.
I liked the sky and detail in the church and rails but it's cropped a bit too much for me.
Rhodese.
Good work on the burnt out tower, this is a shot where the RAW image is easier to work on than the JPEG as the sky and burnt out aspects can be retrieved. The overall image is a bit dark and your new sky has coloured the hips a bit.
Phil-D.
Tower detail good, Sky good and the tone balance is good,
Flying Giraffe.
I like the details in the church and the post and rails, but perhaps a bit too much HDR? This edit really stands out well.
GardenersHelper.
Lots of work here. The church is straight and the twig is gone. The rail is a bit dark but I like the result.
Mr, Nicholas
Your image is a bit too small for a fair assessment Nick. I'm pleased that you have straightened the church but I think it's a bit heavy on the crop.
Overbez.
Glad someone's gone for the monochrome effect. I'm surprised it would only open in Lightzone, I have no experience using that software. The loppy twig has been removed and there's good detail in the tower. The tones are nice but the rails are a bit dark.
Joshwain.
The loppy twig has gone, the sky's good and tower looks good. I think the square crop works here. Not sure if I like the vignetting but good effort.
Proud2Btaff.
The details are very good especially the post and rails. There seems to be a blueish hue to the overall shot but I like it (with reservations).

Judging this isn't easy, I'm going to make sure I don't win any more PP games! :)
I have 4 of you almost equal so it comes down to who removed the twig and who straightened the church.

The PP King in this round is going to be..........................Gardeners Helper with Joshwain 2nd and everyone else close on their heels.
 
Well done Nick:clap:

Here's my edit. It was never going to be a wall-hanging triumph this one so I've decided to colour pick for a bit of added value. This technique isn't to everyone's taste I know so forgive me my indulgence!
I used the RAW image in ACR then cloned out the offending twigs and straightened the church tower.
Using the colour select function I made a new layer by copy and then desaturated the rest of the image.
A little bit of adjustment to the highlights/shadows and Robert's your father's brother.
With more time and diligence I should have got rid of more colour in the bush twigs.

Click for larger

DSCF3396colpik by Farmejim, on Flickr
 
Well done Nick :clap: thanks for the feedback Jim :)........agreed, its a lot easier playing than judging :LOL:
 
Thanks Jim, seems I happened upon the things you were looking for! A good variety of vision and techniques to ponder over. Well done everyone.

Phil - my wife is enjoying this game. She isn't a photographer but I get my best (even if sometimes painful) feedback from her, and she told me what she thought of all the entries (without knowing which one was mine). Her "winner" was your version - amongst other things she thought the colours were the most natural looking, which I think ties in with what Jim said about the tone balance.

The images for the next round are still uploading. I'll post shortly-ish.
 
Five images for this round, captured at Portishead Marina using my G3 a few days ago during a brief break in the rain and 100% cloud cover. Apart from around where the sun (almost) broke through, the sky was pretty murky.

The RAW versions are here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gxez9wrbpjlggkq/aqjytS4OpQ

The files are P1800826.RW2 to P1800830.RW2. Please feel free to use however many of them you think appropriate, including of course just one.

Here are small JPEGs to illustrate the scene. If anyone needs JPEGs to work on I'll use Lightroom to produce full size JPEGs and add them to the Dropbox folder (I don't have OOC JPEGs as I shot these RAW only).

I'll call this some time after midday on Monday. (That's a bit vague, but we have a visit from the tree surgeons on Monday and things might be a bit ... interesting!)


P1800826 600w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


P1800827 600w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


P1800828 600w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


P1800829 600w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


P1800830 600w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
who-hooooo - liking this one Nick!!


.............
Edit....... haven't tried to d.l yet though. I did click the link and got to a folder with six files in it. But didn't attempt to download any.
 
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Well done Nick and thanks for the feedback, Jim! 2nd is good to me, a decent place with no judging required :LOL:

This round looks like it could be interesting, will have a play tomorrow!
 
Dropbox link not working for me.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Dropbox link not working for me.
Click to expand...

Came down fine for me just now....

Click the individual files once you're in the folder the link goes to... #teachgrannytosuckeggs :)
 
GardenersHelper said:
Thanks Jim, seems I happened upon the things you were looking for! A good variety of vision and techniques to ponder over. Well done everyone.

Phil - my wife is enjoying this game. She isn't a photographer but I get my best (even if sometimes painful) feedback from her, and she told me what she thought of all the entries (without knowing which one was mine). Her "winner" was your version - amongst other things she thought the colours were the most natural looking, which I think ties in with what Jim said about the tone balance.

The images for the next round are still uploading. I'll post shortly-ish.
Click to expand...

Nick, thank your wife for me please :D

We're away for the weekend, but hopefully I'll get time to have a go when we get home tomorrow evening :)

Pookeyhead said:
Dropbox link not working for me.
Click to expand...


Its working ok for me, I've just downloaded one of the images from dropbox to ACR without any problems ..........which for me is unusual :D
 
I get this for some reason

eY4aApD.jpg


I'll try again later.
 
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