Dissected Photograph - Obernai Shutter

One of my passions is photography and although I don't make a living at photographing things, I'm sure it wouldn't take much motivation to get me to do so. (Anyone living in Europe willing to pay me to come over and photograph something, anything, I'm all ears).

In addition to my infrequent posts about my experiences in television editing and color correction, I have decided to also post the development of my photography here as a lot of the principals I apply to my still images carry over to my actual paid work in video.

Bear in mind these tutorials assume you know a little something about Photoshop, therefore I won't be explaining the more basic of steps.

I will start with a fairly uncomplicated one, this photograph I took in Obernai, France.



Let me start by saying I am no longer a photography purist. I used to be. I used to guard the fact that I would adjust levels a little feeling like I was "cheating". Well the fact is most photographers embellish their images to some degree and I decided a short time ago I would no longer hide behind my tablet. I was going to boldly broadcast that I touch up my images...a lot. I figured I do that every day with moving images why not with my stills?

Often when I take photographs I have no idea what I'm going to do with them and they usually sit on my hard drive for months and sometimes years before I look at them and start to play. This image really looked to me like it would be a good candidate for a moody night time feel with the broken shutter and papered over window.

The steps in this procedure use extensive use of adjustment layers, in fact a lot of my work uses them because they are so easy to tweak back and forth non-destructively.

The first step was of course to take down the white sky. Luckily the contrast is so great between the sky and the edges of the roofs that it makes a good candidate for separation. I duplicated the blue channel, applied levels to it and pulled the blacks down (concentrating on just the edges and not worrying about the surrounding area).




It was then just a matter of using a black paint brush and painting out the rest of channel.





I then selected the mask by command clicking on the thumbnail of the new channel mask I created and on the layers palette created a new levels adjustment layer. Since we had the channel mask selected when making the adjustment layer it was automatically added as the layer's mask. I pulled the output white down to a darkish grey. I didn't need to take it all the way to black as I will be doing a global darkening of the scene and wanted to take this down with it.





Next, another adjustment layer for the entire image that creates our dark environment. Here I crushed the black input level essentially blacking out all detail on the lower quarter and pulled the output white down about the same amount.





I still found the red roof was a touch too bright and so created a second levels adjustment with a painted mask for this area only. Once again crushing the blacks further and pulling the whites down even more.




You will notice this is a pretty loose mask for the red roof. I wasn't too worried about it going into the sky as I knew in the end this will be crushed down and not visible.

I wanted to add in moonlight to the scene so I created another levels adjustment layer and jacked up the whites and the gamma.





I then created a quick mask and started to paint the areas I actually wanted the moonlight to fall. It may look like random careless brushstrokes but this took a lot of trial and error until I get the right look I was aiming for.







You will notice some spill of light along the roof line and onto the red roof. This was intentional as I was attempting to mimic the moonlight bouncing from the roof onto the adjacent surface.

Next I wanted to bring mood to the image by adding in color. I applied a photo filter adjustment layer.





My next challenge was what to do with the window. I tried several things including putting a shadow in...




...but in the end felt it was more effective to illuminate the room with paper over the windows. This to me is a little more unsettling. Using the pen tool I created paths for the sections of the window. I made a selection from these paths and applied another levels adjustment (which automatically adopted this mask). I also added another photo filter and used the windows layer mask below it as a clipping mask to ensure I was only going to tint the window itself.






And at last the final image...





Hope you enjoyed this quick run through of this image. Please have a look at my gallery and by all means contact me if you'd like to see any particular image "dissected".