Weekly Post-Processing Challenge - Dec. 28, 2014

[sarah_fox]

<p>Hi everyone,</p>

<p>A little bit early, but...</p>

<p>Here's a photo I took with my very own camera. The subject is my very own neighbor, who built this magnificent windmill for historic Yorktown, VA. I watched him build the thing in his garage and driveway in major sections that were assembled on site. Quite a project!</p>

<p>This is the completely unedited, unadjusted, unsharpened version. I think it will give people an opportunity to play with color. In particular, notice that the color temp is very different on each side of the man's face -- cool daylight through the doorway from camera right, vs. warm reflections off of the woodwork from camera left.</p>

<p>Have fun!<br>

Sarah</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Here's a larger version</p><div></div>

[sarah_fox]

<p>By the way, check out this guy's workmanship! Wow!</p><div></div>

[michaellinder]

<p>Agreed, Sarah . . . the workmanship is amazing. And your test image indeed is challenging. It will be fun.</p>

[michaellinder]

<p>I was compelled to try a B&W conversion. First came basis contrast and tonal adjustments in PSE11 and Color Efex Pro 4. The conversion was done in Silver Efex Pro 2, which also included some tonal and structure tweaks.</p><div></div>

[Rick Bortnick]

<p>Sarah,<br /> While the quality of the construction is nice & I like the design elements, the image didn't do much for me. I tried B&W but it still left me wanting. So I started playing. Since your subject was suitably attired,I did a one where I made it a 17th Century TARDIS. Amusing, but I lacked the skills to pull it off well.<br /> So I went back to the design elements. Much overplayed & overworked, but what the heck.<br /><br /></p><div></div>

[Glenn McCreery]

<p>The windmill is quite a woodworking project. It must have taken him years to complete. I played around with the image in color and in black and white. I prefer the black and white version. I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, with a bit of dodging on the face to make it more prominent, a little burning of the highlights, and toning to help give it a vintage look.</p>

<p>Rick, I really like your kaleidoscopic version. Can you explain how you did it?</p><div></div>

[Glenn McCreery]

<p>In addition to the black and white version I also tried combining Sarah's two photographs to show the gear works lying above the main image. They do not line up, but with a lot of cloning, copying and pasting, etc., a somewhat believable image is possible, as long as you do not know what the true architecture looks like. This a quick and dirty attempt so it looks rather smudgey in places.</p><div></div>

[Rick Bortnick]

<p>Glen,<br>

The blending of the images - brilliant. I wish I had thought of it.<br>

The Kaleidoscope was made using Paintshop Pro X3. They have a reflection effect set of filters one of which will give you a kaleidoscope. To get the face I inverted the image, made adjustments to the offsets to get the faces only & their positions with the beams. Duped layer & used Fracatilus to pop colors on the beams. Basically it gave me color & black. Deleted the black & left the color. Adjusted transparency of that layer & then hit the save/send buttons</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Michael, your rendering has somewhat of a wood block quality to it that's rather interesting!</p>

<p>Glen, like you and Michael, I'm also drawn to monochrome versions of this sort of subject matter. However, my "personal" goal with this particular photograph (and with candids in general) is to develop my techniques working with color. I'm trying to break out of my monochrome rut. ;-)</p>

<p>I, too, like the combined image and wish I'd thought of it! I think if the shaft were tweaked over to the left a bit (would take a bit of cloning work), it would be perfect. I might do that yet with the original image! I could have shot this image with a wider lens on my 5D, but the 18-55IS on my 40D was all I had with me when I ran into my neighbor showing off his creation. ;-)</p>

<p>Rick, the kaleidoscope is pretty cool, but I think I would enjoy seeing your attempt at the 17th century tardis!</p>

<p>This is my own attempt at making this image work:</p>

<p>First I broke the image into hue, saturation, and lightness channels. Then I applied a curve to the saturation channel to limit the wild saturation levels in the woodwork, bringing them all more in line, and then I recombined the channels. Next, I created a duplicate layer, masked off my neighbor, applied two different contrast curves to the neighbor layer and the underlying creation layer. My goal was to make the wood all less vivid and to make this more of a candid portrait of my neighbor in the context of his windmill.</p><div></div>

[igord]

<p>@Sara Fox, I think the neighbour looks little bit like pasted from the other image now. The colour of the wood is very good and natural on the first image. Something in between would work ;)</p>

[Glenn McCreery]

<p>Rick: Thank you for the information and kind words. For editing, I export from Aperture or Lightroom to Camera Raw, and then to Photoshop CS5, where I can use various Nik and Topaz filters. But I have not found a Photoshop plug-in that will do kaleidoscopes. I suppose that I could crop to half a photo, copy it, invert the copy, and past the inverted image to join the non-inverted image. That would represent one fold and two symmetrical images. The process could be repeated once to create four symmetrical images. To create 16 symmetrical images, the next two crops would need to be along opposing diagonals if my mental imagery is correct. Easier said than done, so finding a copy of Paintshop Pro for Mac would be the way to go.</p>

[Glenn McCreery]

<p>Well, there is no Paintshop Pro for Mac, but I did find a video explaining how to make a kaleidoscopic image at

The process is rather complicated, and the commentator talks fast, so I need to watch the video a few times, while taking notes, before trying it.</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Thanks, Igor! I've gotten the same comment from someone else, and I think I agree with the two of you. What seems unnatural is the light not spilling all the way through the doorway to the floor. I basically opened up that part of the mask, while keeping the background woodwork darkened. What do you think?</p>

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/17934289-lg.jpg" alt="" width="467" height="700" /></p>

<p>By the way, the oversaturated wood tones in the background result from all the lighting being indirect. The walls themselves do have a somewhat red tone. The sunlight hits the wall behind the camera, casting bright reddish light against the reddish woodwork on the opposite wall. The further-reddened red tones thus become quite vivid.</p>

[charles_h2]

<p>I guess it's irony that some photos should be paintings, and some paintings should be photographs. I felt this was more of a painting, so that was my goal. I was on the same page to darken the background, and bring out the man and his machine, but also to show that the machine works........</p>

[charles_h2]

<p>Had to re-size the image</p><div></div>

[jordan2240]

<p>All in PSE 13, as usual: Added a layer and adjusted levels using the droppers. Thought it looked a little cool, so added a mild warming filter via another layer. Added a 'backlight' color curves layer. Adjusted hue slightly using another layer, then sharpened 60%. Basically tried to reduce some of the overall yellow tint and produce more natural colors. May not have succeeded, but might depend on who's looking at it.</p>

<p>Fantastic structure, by the way. Hard to believe it was made by hand in a garage.</p><div></div>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Charles, I was thinking of a Renaissance painting as well! I might have gotten away with magical light in a painting, but not in a photo. ;-) I like that you added the product coming out the chute! Nice PP on that detail, but... and I hate to say it... but it should be flour or cornmeal coming out, not the whole grain! ;-)</p>

<p>Bill, hard to believe indeed! I think he worked on it for a couple of years. He started with the gear assembly, and we would see its progress everyday as we took walks by his house. His son helped a lot, and eventually their Boy Scout troop got involved. Of course we all know how that goes -- 99% of the work was still his. He and his son occasionally showcase the windmill at various events. His son's costume is a small version of his -- miller and apprentice. Mom was the seamstress and did a marvelous job.</p>

[charles_h2]

<p>Sarah</p>

<p>Thanks for pointing that out. I tried it with flour, but I liked the texture and color of the grain better. The white flour stood out a little too much, taking my eye away from the man. It was fun working on it. That is the objective right?</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>I admit the whole kernels are more visually grabbing! ;-)</p>

<p>For the purpose of my photo, I think it would be good if everything weren't so new and fresh -- if it were a working mill with at least a few years of use on it and without a spanking clean floor. However, I just interpret the photo as the miller inspecting his finished mill sometime before the first harvest and dreaming of all the flour he's going to grind with it! It really is almost that, except that this may never become a working mill.</p>

[igord]

<p>@Sara Fox. I think that the best solution to avoid the paste effect would be to make one curves correction over the whole image. It is too much red so red curve would be the culprit in RGB or yellow/cyan curves in CMYK. Or just use selective colour removing magenta and yellow in reds and yellows in yellows.<br>

I always find skin, wood, grass the most difficult to color grade!</p>

[MathewDH]

<p>I chose to crop the photo to a 4 x 5 ratio. This eliminated the incomplete structure details above his head. I modified the area of the vertical shaft so it stood out better from the back wall. I also altered the areas around his face to make it show up better from the wall details.</p><div></div>

[jordan2240]

<p>Well, we actually made it through 3 months with the challenge, and are about to embark on a New Year (or already have depending on your location). So, the weekly Wednesday solicitation this week consists of the text that accompanied the first challenge, for all those who are new to the thread and may not be sure of how it works. With the new year, hopefully there will be some new blood willing to contribute either as challenge poster, participant editor, or both. All are welcome, regardless of level of experience. Here's the original instruction (well, slightly modified):</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Welcome to the ‘Post-Processing Challenge.’ If you’ve been following the threads, you’ll know what this is about, but in a nutshell, a photonetter will post an image that has had no or limited processing performed outside the camera, and other photonetters will offer their take on how to process that image. <strong>By default, the challenge will be for the participants to process the image as if it was their own, so anything goes, but the challenge poster each week can offer a different challenge if desired.</strong><br /><br /> The challenge shot should be uploaded with a high enough resolution to be easily worked. Using Lex’s suggestion in another thread, I uploaded my image to one of my photo.net folders at full res, then dragged and dropped it into this thread. It will display in-line, but when downloaded, it sizes at about 1500 on the long end. That seems to be a sufficient size to work with. If you are concerned about theft, feel free to put your watermark on the image, use a lower resolution, or post something you wouldn’t care to sell. If you post a challenge photo and use a different method from that I’ve noted, please include a version that will post in-line for ease of comparison. The test forum here is a great place to experiment with such things.<br /><br /> Participants should edit the downloaded photo then post it back to the thread so it also posts in-line. If you want to link to a larger version to show additional detail, please do (unless the photo.net bosses tell us not to). It’s up to each individual as to whether or not they want to view other edits prior to posting their own (thus risking being influence by them), but edit only the challenge shot!<br /><br /> Participants should divulge the level of detail of their processing they are comfortable with, but at a minimum, it would be nice to know what software was used. No one is expecting you to give up any trade secrets! Discussion about the edits is encouraged, but try to view everyone as a close personal friend and not an anonymous stranger. And no flaming the challenge image.<br /><br /> Anyone wishing to post a challenge image should respond to the weekly solicitation within the challenge thread, or just email me through my photo.net profile. </p>

</blockquote>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Thanks for your edit, Mathew! I don't object to the structure overhead (sort of like it), but I have to say I love the cleanness of your edit. Nicely done!</p>

<p>Happy New Year, everyone! :-)</p>

[mhahn]

<p>Made the color of the far wall a little less vivid and a little lighter (from the man's chin down to his waist, the wall looked a little too dark). Sharpened the image as well.</p><div></div>