The Story
March, 2009. My wife was born in Paris but lived the most of her life in Marinha Grande which is a city near Leiria, about 140km north of Lisboa. She only left Marinha Grande when we moved in together and since that time that we frequently go there for her to be with her parents. This day was one of those days. We left home in the morning to be there at lunch time. The trip from Corroios to Marinha Grande is quite quick: it's about 160km, almost all in the highway, so we usually take one hour and a half, two hours top, to get there. We arrived and had some lunch. After that I left them catching up and drove to Leiria to take some photos.
I walked the most of the city center, trying to get some good photos and eventually stopped by the Leiria Castle. This photo was taken from inside of the Leiria's Castle, looking at the city.
As usually, I didn't took my tripod (I rarely take it with me, I haven't got used to carry it all the time yet), so this photo was taken, hand held, in a bracketing sequence, with the intent of trying some HDR processing afterward. In the end, I've preferred to don't go to HDR, but to a Black and White photo.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/125 second
F/9.0
10 mm
400
Original Photo
Post Processing
This photo processing was a mess :)
Originally I intended to do some HDR processing with this one. I tried to do it but, as the visibility was very low (it was almost raining and it was very humidity in the air) the result was disastrous.
So I imported the photo into Lightroom and started playing around with the presets. I've applied the "Matt's 300 Look - Strong" preset (you can find it here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/monday-presets-the-300-look), followed by the COL Nikonians - Mode Illa (you can find it here: http://www.presetsheaven.com/2008/08/30/deviant-presets-for-lightroom-ii-turns-the-light-on) and finally the COL Polarizer (can't remember where I got it from).
After this, I've increased the Exposure and decreased the Fill Light, darkened the Blue levels, increased the Contrast and the Sharpening and reduced the color noise. That was it for Lightroom.
I then exported it as a PSD file and opened it in CS4. In CS4, I've done: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast and Auto Color and converted to Black and White. Then, I selected the sky only and applied the "Gray Grad (121)" action to the sky (you can find this and other actions to simulate the effect of Gradient filters here: http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com). Finally I increased again the Contrast. This gave me the full size (10Mp) final image.
I usually publish my photos with 1024px in the largest size and use a great Photoshop action by Manyk to do the re-size.
You can find it here: http://manyk.deviantart.com/art/Web-Sharpening-with-Photoshop-29038461
Final Photo
Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/Royal-View-117105040
0 comentários:
Post a Comment