Skip to main content

"Sailboat"


A sailboat travels the Western Channel opposite the Toronto waterfront on a spring afternoon in 2008. I set my shutter speed to 1.6 seconds to blur the motion of the boat and pointed my wide-angle (24mm) lens slightly downward to fill the bottom two-thirds of the frame with water.

Working with wide-angle lenses is tricky where perspective distortion is concerned. Tilting the lens downward made the buildings in the background of the BEFORE image appear to lean away from the center of the frame. I straightened the image with a perspective correction. 

 Perspective corrections force you to crop - in this case, from the bottom and sides of the frame. (When setting up a shot that will require perspective correction, I frame the image with extra space to allow for cropping later.) 

 I wanted to brighten the water while preserving contrast between the very bright reflection of the boat and the darker surface of the water. It is usually the case in photoshop that there is more than one way to achieve any given result. Here, I decided to apply a "shadows/highlights" adjustment. Caution: the shadows/highlights tool has to be used with great care. I find many images that look obviously and unappealingly "photoshopped" get that appearance from heavy-handed application of shadows/highlights adjustments.

 The BEFORE image has a color cast - notice the magenta tones in the sky. I corrected this with a color temperature adjustment of the RAW file.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Boat Tour"

On a boat tour of Western Brook Pond in western Newfoundland two women focused on the spectacular scenery while I focused on them. The pastel colors of their windbreakers contrasted with each other and with the natural tones of the land, water and sky. The image tells a strong, simple story: two people awestruck by 600 meter (2000 foot) cliffs towering over a remote, pristine lake. This image required less work than many of the others featured in this blog. It's a good example of how even relatively modest adjustments can transform a photograph from merely "interesting" to "worthy of displaying". I wanted to separate the women from the landscape - make each part of the image stand out in its own right. I was taken by the colors and textures of the jackets so I increased vibrancy a little to bring out the color and used  fine-contrast and tone curve adjustments to  highlight the fabric's folds and shadows. I added drama to the background through t
Post a Comment
Read more

"Refinery"

Nine years ago when I took this photograph of the Irving oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, I framed it so that the highway ran diagonally across the bottom of the image. Looking at it now, I wish I had framed it with the edge of the road parallel to the bottom of the frame. This kind of change is easily made with a horizontal perspective adjustment, rotating the image around a vertical axis running through the center of the frame. As is always the case with a perspective adjustment, a crop is forced. But the photo needed cropping in any case because there was too much uninteresting space at the tops and sides of the BEFORE image. I corrected the underexposure of the BEFORE image. The light was also dull because the morning fog from the nearby Bay of Fundy had not yet completely burned off. To counter this I used tone curve and fine contrast adjustments to add clarity and contrast. I paid special attention to adding contrast to the fuel storage tanks on the left. I wan
Post a Comment
Read more

"Alaska Highway"

A lot of interesting things are happening in this photograph shot on the Alaska Highway on a spring day near Haines Junction, Yukon. The jagged, snow-covered mountains with diagonal shadows created by late-afternoon sun; the dramatic curve of the highway swooping into and out of the frame; the cloudy sky; the finger of bare, rust-colored trees and brush jutting into the photo from the lower left. The trick was to maximize the potential in each of these separate elements, and then pull them together into a coherent, believable photograph. The first thing that struck me was the strong bluish cast in the BEFORE image. I did a color balance correction to warm up the palette. But I still wasn't satisfied so I used a hue/saturation adjustment layer in photoshop to de-intensify the yellow and red tones. My goal was to strike a good balance between warmth and whiteness in the snow and clouds. Those were global adjustments. But I also had to work separately on the three distinct
Post a Comment
Read more