Post Processing Challenge May 31, 2020

There are no rules as to how you apply your post processing to this image; but, please let us know what you have done so we can all learn.

If you would like to post a candidate image next week, please ensure it is of sufficiently high resolution for manipulation by the participants (3000px on the long side, 300dpi for example).

 

Most of all, let's have fun while we are learning or demonstrating how we use our post-processing software, imaginations and interpretations.

Horsey Impressionism?

In ACR I just lightened the shadows, increased vibrance slightly to heighten color, cropped to focus more on the horses, and did a slight vignette.

Nice photo, Glenn!

I used it as an opportunity to get some practice with the Lightroom luminance mask. I wanted to focus the viewers’ attention on the horses, so I decided to try to restrict most of the image’s high-contrast moments to the rim-light on the horses or to their reflections by darkening the lake.

 

 

All in Lightroom:

1. cropped
   
2. increased the white point to accentuate the rim lighting on the horses, and increased contrast slightly
   
3. used an adjustment brush from the lakeshore on up: reduced exposure two stops, then increased contrast and white point and reduced shadows and black point to bring out the ripples in the water
   
4. adjusted the luminance mask so that the adjustments affected only the water and not the trees—I like this tool a lot
   
5. used the tone curve panel to increase blue in the highlights and reduce it elsewhere (I played around with this until the lake color looked right)
   
6. used the HSL panel to move the blues slightly away from green
   
7. added a graduated filter for the foreground, lightening shadows and increasing exposure slightly; used a brush to apply it to the horses, too
   
8. used another brush to darken left mid-ground, and another to lighten the face of the right-hand horse
   
9. the branches weren’t looking good, so I added two radial filters from the upper right corner to increase contrast, increase highlights, darken shadows, and increase warmth
   
10. cloned out a few distractions
    

Crop & Level adjustment in LR. Added Tonal Contrast in NIK.

I had the idea of a 'misty morning' version and pretty much follwed (but adapted)

. In this photo there are a lot more trees, branches and undergrowth than in the tutorial example so I fudged it a lot. I later added in a Teal/Orange Color lookup Table (LUT) to give the ground a more reddish color. I cropped slightly, mainly to to remove edges (for example the river/lake at the top right of the original) where my PP led to visually ambiguous results, in the example just a white stripe in the photo. I'm not completely happy with the results (tree trunks) but just as an experiment, it was useful and I don't want to spend more time on 'polishing'.

 

Glenn, your horses have run off to Punta Colorada.

 

Here are the layers I used.

 

Hattie and Harry commented that something about the horses didn't look quite right in my previous submission so I fixed it according to their suggestions and included them for reference.

I just puttered around...

 

Nice puttering JDM. I like all the renditions, even the Corgi-horses.

 

My own approach was to convert the photo to black and white using Photoshop and NIK SilverEfex.

Edited June 2, 2020 by Glenn McCreery

1, I selected a portion of the original image to focus on the horses.

2, Using PS CS6 I used shadows/Highlights to brighten the horses

3, Increased the vibrance and saturation

4. Used the Oil Paint filter to give it the painting look

5. put the selected image into a picture frame I copied ogg the web.

Basic curves.