After and Before
Week 44 - Pair by
morganthecat, on Flickr
What:
Photo of two similar, albeit not identical, Victorian houses along Newton Road in Faversham.
Why:
The renovation of Rose Bank (left) has completed in 2011. I have been fascinated to see the revealing of such a vibrant and colourful building. My view of Victorian buildings has always been that they are dour, dark, coal stained, imposing monoliths of Dickensian suppression. And Rose Bank probably became this in just a matter of months. But also this reveals the truth that when originally built they were sparkling jewels of colour with ornate and intricate detailing.
I have intended to take this photograph since earlier in the year when the renovation was complete as I think it is a magnificent building, as of course is its more classically envisaged neighbour. It was a lousy day with lousy, dull and dreary flat light but I needed to shoot this as my penultimate submission to the 2011 edition of
A Year in the Life of Faversham.
How:
Composition: shot from down low which may appear a curious choice given that I knew I would need to deal with both keystoning and distortion in PPing, but it was a purposely choice as I wanted to remove distracting elements behind the garage in the final edit (I suppose I could have shot from a higher vantage point and cloned these out instead).
HDR: a handheld 5 shot HDR covering +/- 2 eV, as I wanted to get as much detail and pop out of this image as possible especially given that it was shot on a dull, flat day. The RAW images were adjusted in LR 3.6 first - this included recovery to ensure as much detail was retained, fill light and blacks, sharpening, noise adjustments, clarity and a little vibrance and saturation - before processing in Photomatix Pro with I hope a degree of subtlety.
Keystoning: the HDR image was then imported as the tif file into CS5 and the keystoning was addressed using a combination of the distortion and skew tools in the Free Transform mode.
Cloning: the telephone wires and street lamp were removed using a combination of the clone stamp tool and the spot healing brush in content aware mode. It was a case of empirically using each depending on the situation.
Removal of wires was made easier using the Pen Tool which by selecting two anchor points will draw a straight line - on a PC you can take your straight line and 'bend' it slightly by adding a third anchor point in the middle and then whilst holding the Ctrl key (to bring up a hand icon) you can then drag the third anchor point so that the straight line curves to match the drooping wires. This creates a path and if you then select the spot healing brush, you can stroke the path with the brush by selecting the Paths tab (to the right of your standard Layers tab in the bottom right hand corner of Photoshop) and clicking the "Stroke path with brush" icon at the bottom (where the "Create fill or adjustment layer" icon is on the Layers tab).
I found that where the wire crossed brick work, roof tiles and sky, it worked best if you dealt with the wire as if there were 3 separate wires rather than attempt to do it in one go.
Removal of the cars in front of the garage was a case of taking small sections and using the clone stamp tool to 'build' the garage door. The right hand side wall was cloned just using the clone stamp tool in small patches rather than resorting to the
vanishing point clone tool as ably demonstrated by the excellent Gavin Hoey.
Dodge/burn: the final step was to lighten Rose Bank and darken the neighbouring house as the HDR process had made the two buildings look too similar in their vibrancy. This was a subjective choice, and is based on the several times I have stopped to look at Rose Bank during and following its renovation.
Learnt:
The varied ways of using the clone stamp tool as well as the excellent spot healing brush in content aware mode in my newly upgraded CS5.
How to remove keystoning in CS5.
A number of keyboard short cuts which I have overlooked as I don't tend to use Photoshop a great deal, preferring Lightroom as my standard tool of choice.
Improvement:
Sky. I am unsatisfied with the sky, particularly where the removal of the telephone wires has left some lightening in the sky (that may not be the case, and may be more my imagination).
Composition. I should have shot slightly wider to ensure that once I had removed the keystoning, I would retain the far left pillar of the front wall.
Dodge/burn. I should have applied a touch of the history brush to remove some of the haloing (at least to my eye) around Rose Bank following the dodging to help give the sense of how radiant the building looks next to its neighbour. I also appear to have failed to dodge a little of the top of the gable wall, and not dodged the chimney stack at all.
Distortion. I purposely did not want to shoot ultra wide as the distortion of the Olympus 7-14mm, although not severe, is somewhat complex and I did not want to have to try and correct that. However whilst I have successfully addressed the keystoning at the far left and right, there does appear to be some distortion remaining in the 'internal' edges of the two buildings.
Artistic licence. There was a big decision to be made in the presentation of this image. Whether for a historical 'record shot' of these buildings I should have included the street lamp and telephone wires of the original shot, or to offer an interpretation of the building when it was originally built without these items. I decided to go with the latter as I wanted to not draw the viewer's attention away from the comparison of the buildings which is the purpose of the image. I am very please with the final image, but will not be too distressed if it is not selected for the Faversham 365 as it is an artistic interpretation and not truth.
For reference, here is the base exposure used for the HDR:
Untitled by
morganthecat, on Flickr