Back To Work

Well... For most everyone but I still have a week left on my vacations so I will be having my big push in the office project. I hope we all had a good Thanksgiving and restful weekend. Seems the football was rather lopsided and black Friday was  very dark for some families. I like the idea of Cyber Monday which started on Thanksgiving day. It is really too bad for the family in Long Island that lost a son just picking up some work at Wall-Mart. Or the two families that lost husbands and fathers in the shoot-out in a Toys-R-Us in California. Just amazing!

On with the blog. But before I start in I will make the obligatory 

*  *  *  G E E K  A L E R T  *  *  * 

for those that want to take a pass. Cya!

Ok... Here we go! 

One of my brothers-in-law gave me a CD with a number of images he had taken of a lighthouse while we were out on the west coast in September. I am not going to get into composition, framing or the rule of thirds as I actually think the strength of the lighthouse with the foreground elements draws the viewer into the image. The one thing the image is lacking is the pop and depth that post processing really excels at.

Photo by Terry Schnell © 2008

Not being an HDR processed image the fact there is a dynamic horizon in the image make layer composition very formidable. This is simply where a portion of an image is extracted and treated differently than the rest of the image. In this case where the sky is overexposed and the foreground is not too far off we can simply make some levels adjustments then select a blending option that works the best.

Above you can see the layers pallet that make the image below. The "Levels 1 MLP" layer adjusts the sky to a level that bring definition. The MLP is my code to let my know that I am using the Multiply blending mode which further deepens the effect of the level adjustment. As I did not need to do this effect to the  foreground I used the layer mask to block the levels adjustment.

The "Isolated SC" layer is a copy of the foreground. This was done by selecting the mask from the layer below, activating the Background layer and extracting the foreground to a new layer. The last adjustment on this layer was to change the blending mode to Screen. Hence the SC on the layer name.

These adjustments gave the image the pop and depth I was looking for. Now for a small vignette to furteh focus the viewers eye on the primary image. All in all it took about ten minutes (five in selection) of work on make a good image to make it a really cool looking image.

I guess it is back to work for me afterall. back to the office project.

Cya... Doug