I have been working on my photo editing recently and have been learning a good bit from people like Brian Auer over at Epic Edits and Steve Paxton over at Paxton Prints. I have been attempting to replicate some of their editing techniques with some of my photographs, this is a work in progress.
Recently Brian posts an edit he did to a photography of a rusty old truck that I thought would apply to a photograph that I took a couple of months ago at Remlinger Farms. Remlinger Farm is this great place to take kids, especially in the fall. They have all kinds of rides and things to kids to explore. They also have a couple retired fire trucks for kids to play around on along with a old school bus.
This shot I chose to work with was something I took of one of the fire trucks headlights, since the paint is so weathered and old I thought it might make a good artistic shot.
Here is the processing I did to this photo:
1. RAW File from Camera – I decided not to edit this at all before I started processing this in Photoshop, I took this right out of the camera into Lightroom, then into Photoshop (Elements, I have not sprung for CS3).
2. Linear Light Layer – I created a new layer with 43% Opacity.
3. Black and White Adjustment – I created a new layer converted it to B&W with a 65% Opacity.
4. Adjusted the Saturation – As Brian did, I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to set the saturation to -50.
5. Warming Filter – I added a Photo Filter adjustment layer set to a Warming Filter (LBA) at 45%.
6. Sharpen – Lastly I added a Unsharp Mask at 86%, 2.0 pixels and a threshold of 0.
So as you can see from Brian's post not much of this is original on my part, in fact I am still learning what most of these adjustment do on their own. But I figure this is the best way to learn I don't think Brian would mind.
Nice effect there, I like it. Oh, nice choice of render, it fits with the effects
Great work!
One trick I use to pull out extreme textures is to copy/merge all the layers into a single layer (ALT+CTRL+Shift+E). I then apply a high pass filter (using a radius setting of ten or more). Change the layer’s blending mode to Hard Light or Soft Light (depending on how extreme you want to go). You can take it a step further by selectively painting in this affect using a layer mask (so that it only affects the areas of texture). You can duplicate this new layer to make the affect more extreme.
Another fun way to tone down the saturation is to duplicate/merge all the layers (as I mentioned above) and apply a High Pass filter of ten or so. Then change the blending mode to Color. This should remove the color from the layer. Now back down the opacity to 20% or so to let just a hint of the layer show through.
Your series of images of the truck headlight look wonderful. Keep up the great work
Nice work Mark! The similarities between our photos are scary — both from the front corner with basically the same perspective. The abundance of red in your photo certainly lends itself well to this type of processing. The color and tone really came out nice.
It’s funny, the technique I used was actually learned from Jake Garn, but he uses it for portraits sometimes. Just goes to show that a technique intended for one type of photo can certainly be applied to other types too. Here’s another one I used this technique with. In fact, I like using it so much that I made a Photoshop action out of it so I can quickly check photos to see if there’s any potential with it
Thanks everyone! Steve great suggestions I will give them a try. I am working on a landscape with some of the concepts you have you your site I will post it when I get it done.
Thanks Brian, it was a little freaky that I had a shot so similar