POTD 7 May 2015 - Number 19

[Mike Farley]

Billg of this parish told me before my trip to Malta that I would be taking lots of pictures of doors. Well I did take quite a few, mainly in Valletta where I found this example.

Technical details. A lot of processing in Lightroom to get the basic diffused and saturated effect, but it needed some further work in Photoshop and Color Efex. I used the Lightroom auto transform feature to correct the slightly distorted perspective, but this did not leave much space on the right and the grill was on the edge of the image. Once in PS, I extended the right hand side canvas by 2 centimetres, selected the new area and used Content Aware Fill (a useful tool, sadly not available in PS Elements*) to fill it. Part of the gold grill was duplicated in the new area, so I cloned that out. I also removed what looked like a bottle of washing liquid at the bottom right hand side of the door. Then into Color Efex for some subtle changes to complete the effect.

* In PS Elements, I would have needed the clone tool which would have worked just as well. The use of Content Aware Fill mainly saved me a bit of time.

[Mike Farley]

From here to there. This is the unprocessed Raw file.

[davidc]

Interesting seeing the before and after, thanks for sharing.

For me, on the finished version the door knob looks weirdly out of place - before I saw the before shot, I actually thought you'd photoshopped it in. I think it's because there's a subtle outline on the pre-processed shot that isn't there (or far less distinct) on the processed one.

I'd be interested in the thought process behind taking the shot, what appealed to you most about the scene that led to taking the shot?

[Mike Farley]

I see what you mean about the door knob, it does seem to just float there, doesn't it?

When I saw the scene, I was attracted by the way the different elements fitted together and the blue colour contrasting with the yellow/gold of the grill. This might well not end up being the final version as it does not quite have the diffuse glow I envisaged at the taking stage. If I can find it, somewhere I have a back issue of the RPS Digital Imaging Group magazine in which someone described how they made what initially looked like an ordinary image into something quite special, using the sort of techniques I might need here. Even if it does not work out, it will be a useful learning process.

Thanks for the feedback.

[davidc]

The finished version is a huge improvement - don't take this the wrong way but I found looking at the two images and seeing the processing improvements between the two, working out how the change happened and how you achieved it to be the strongest learning aspect

[Mike Farley]

The finished version is a huge improvement - don't take this the wrong way but I found looking at the two images and seeing the processing improvements between the two, working out how the change happened and how you achieved it to be the strongest learning aspect

No offence taken. This is an early attempt at something like this and I am still learning myself. After I posted I began wondering whether I had actually got the best out of the shot. Would it help if I went through my processing in more detail?