Postprocessing Challenge 27 April 2018

Hello to all! I'm GC's stand-in for this week. Please reread his guidelines on last week's thread if needed.

LR...adjust shadows and highlights. NIK Color Efex Pro 4 for Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast.

Hi Michael thanks for the challenge. Started in LR, levelled horizon along top of blue building. In LR basic adjustments then transferred to PS Elements. Back to LR and cropped along top edge of blue building. Opened this crop in Elements, aligned this on the top of main image as seen in finished pic. Flattened both and then cropped to finished result.

This morning I was walking the dog and photographing pelicans on the opposite coast in Santa Barbara, so I decided to change the sky to what I photographed this morning. I flood selected the sky in Affinity Photo, selected the inverse, and pasted the result on a suitable sky with clouds image. Then I flattened layers, cloned out background buildings, added the pelicans from this morning's photos, and cropped.

In Lightroom +Clarity, Dehaze, Vibrance, Saturation. In photoshop created new blank document, outlined crude fin outline using polygonal lasso tool, filled with blue gray color, used blending mode emboss to give 3d look, dragged fin image onto Michaels and used a layer mask to eliminate background around fin, flattened image and used clone tool to smooth edges of fin. Played Jaws soundtrack while doing all this.

I very much liked your idea Gerald to cut out the centre that I had to have a go myself. I also liked Bill's enhancements so I have combined the two and added back the large tree as it caused a shadow in the sea.

Since the cityscape occupies most of the frame, I started in PSE15 by cropping out about 2/3rds of the water, followed by using levels to adjust the tonalities. I then converted the image to b&w in Silver Efex, and made additional tonal adjustments and sharpened using that program.