One Photo Focus – June

June 3, 2016 by lauramacky 34 Comments

It’s One Photo Focus time!  I rather enjoy this challenge of taking someone’s photo and editing it into our own creation.  Thank you David Croker for providing this week’s original photo.  Please check out David’s blog when you have time.  And as always, thank you Stacy for coordinating this challenge!  Please check out the entire the entire challenge with everyone’s edits on Stacy’s blog by clicking here.

I’ve been seeing a lot of images where almost the entire image is dark except for a few areas like a snow capped mountain or an ocean wave illuminated in the night.  I thought I’d try it out with this image although I couldn’t quite push myself to the extreme but this may be a decent first try.  

The Process:

1.  Imported image to LR and made basic adjustments like clarity, curves, highlights and shadows along with some pre-sharpening.

2.  Opened in Photoshop and duplicated layer.

3.  Used Topaz Denoise lightly.

4.  Used a dark Old Painting texture (JD Beautiful World Textures by Jessica Drossin) and used a layer mask to hide the line of ships.

5.  Applied unsharp mask to sharpen the boats only.

6.  I didn’t feel the boats had enough structure, so I added a layer from Topaz Glow called Black Sketch Overlay at a reduced opacity and applied it to the line of boats only.

7.  Used Nik Color Efex to add a Dynamic Contrast and Skylight filter at reduced opacities.

8.  Added a curve to lighten things up a bit.

Hope you enjoy it!

 

One Photo Focus – June – Edited by Laura Macky

Original by David Croker