Weekly Post-Processing Challenge - January 25, 2015

<p>Hi all,</p>

<p>As promised, here is the next PP challenge photo. I attended a local jazz festival last weekend. This one-man-show guy played between a couple of bands, doing sort of a jazz/funk fusion thing. He was fun to watch. Anyway, I pulled out my camera and got a couple of snaps from the audience. The background is awful/boring, and the lighting is rather plain. However, I thought the guy an interesting subject. I was curious what others might do with such a photo. Feel free to add flying saucers if necessary. Maybe an alien looking over his shoulder? A parrot on the mic boom? Or just work with what's there. Have fun.</p>

<p>Here's the larger image: http://www.photo.net/photo/17953649</p>

<p>And the smaller image is attached below. No adjustments or sharpening have been done.</p><div></div>

<p>I was drawn (no pun intended) by his face, in particular his grin. The face is soft & no matter what I did, I was not content with how I was sharpening, accentuating it. I cropped close & made it B&W - better but still not quite. I then through it into Sketch Drawer - liked that (may post it later). But I still just wanted the face & cropping was unsatisfying. so I used Analog Efex, made a triptych of the grin at different magnifications. My take for the nonce.</p><div></div>

<p>I decided to give him stardom<br /> I added a layer with a crowd and one with his head. Masked<br /> Adjusted lighting in Color Efex. Added a gradient layer, masked. Added a spotlight with the render filter. Did a lot of layering, blending and layer ordering. Converted to B&W in Silver Effex. Added texture, masked.</p><div></div>

<p>Cropped left and bottom, resized, adjusted levels in PSE11. Used Color Efex Pro 4 for adjusting contrast (pro contrast), adding dark contrasts, adjusting warmth and glamor glow. Inspired by Line, I went back to PSE11's lighting effects filter to add crossing spotlights.</p><div></div>

<p>Couldn't resist capitalizing on that look. Made layer with toilet and masked, painfully, the portion that was behind the keyboard. Also used the paintbrush to draw lines down the legs to straighten them up from my crappy masking. Added a solid black adjustment layer and masked out portions using different opacities to get a vignette look. No adjustments to lighting and such.</p><div></div>

<p>Very creative edits! As always, Line has taken a wonderful creative angle with the blending of the magnified face. I think my own focus is just to fix the ugly background. This is a pretty rough edit, because I only had a moment to do it, but I simply created a foreground layer and gave it just a bit of rim lighting (dodging) to bring out the shoulders and mic. I also blurred the background and cloned out the flaws. My masking was pretty crappy too, as I used the magic wand for time's sake. ;-)<br /> <img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/17954633-md.jpg" alt="" width="680" height="570" /></p>

<p> </p>

<p>At first I was at a loss on what I could do to improve upon Sarah's shot and still have some creative fun until I started fiddling around adding some distortion with CS5 ACR Lens Correction Transform panel and got a flash back to my graphic design days at "The Armadillo", an early 80's Brownsville, TX entertainment rag that reviewed music concert events and other human interests.</p>

<p>Lens Correction settings in a 4x5 crop...Vertical: +40, Horizontal: +74, Rotate: -1.7...</p>

<p>Added my own custom vintage '70's color film preset I came up with years ago with added Grain setting...A40, S76, R85, with added Vignette Highlight Priority to taste.</p>

<p>Did some cloning to get rid of the sign and left corner artifacts. Added type font: "PortagoITC TT" in Photoshop and distorted by dragging type bounding box points and chose a color to complement the canvas background, an element that ended up aiding me to take it this far.</p><div></div>

<p>Just basic curves.</p><div></div>

<p>I couldn't resist taking another shot at it - this time a B&W conversion (Silver Efex Pro 2 - toning in Color Efex Pro 4).</p><div></div>

<p>If anyone has a shot for next week, let me know. I have one I can put forth if no one else volunteers (with some specific editing rules as well).</p>

<p>And what editing rules would those be, Bill?</p>

<p>Why would you need to emphasize that here? Did someone break some rules?</p>

<p>No Tim, sorry, didn't mean to imply any rules. The challenge poster is allowed to make specific requests as to what he would like the participants to attempt, so that's what I was referring to. I should have said 'specific editing requests.'</p>

<p>Bill</p>

<p>Please excuse my misunderstanding of your statement, Bill.</p>

<p>And thanks for making it more clear what you meant.</p>

<p>The musician and his gear cut and pasted onto a gradient map.</p><div></div>

<p>I'm a bit lax at welcoming new participants each week, as I'm not very good at remembering who posts from one week to another, but I'm pretty sure Margo is a new participant and don't know that I recall posts from Tim before either, so thank you both for participating. And thanks to all the regulars as well. Always interesting to see how different minds work and how much talent there is out here.</p>

<p>Bill,<br>

I'll toss one out again unless you rather offer one up.</p>

<p>Ok Rick, go ahead. I'll keep mine in my back pocket.</p>

<p>Thanks, Bill. A fellow PN member told me about the forum so I thought I'd look it up. Glad I did!</p>