Reflections of Allaire
Canon 5D
EF 24-105mm
I shot this photo and decided because it was an old village I would try and make it look a little ghostly w/o going overboard. I shot this same shot at least 100 times never really happy w/ it. I think it needed to be B&W all along. Should I crop out some of sky since it looks blown out. It isn't blown out in orig. any ideas?
Last edited by denise ippolito; 10-29-2008 at 11:32 AM.
Denise,
I like the look you've achieved - sort of dreamy. Have you tried Ortonizing it? Might increase the dreaminess. I think the image would work well in BW too.
On the sky - if there are some clouds there you could try overdoing the contrast in just the sky before desaturating to create some texture there. Otherwise I'd vote for a nearly square crop - down to just above the roof, and then burn the remaining patches of bright sky so attention stays on the building.
Chris, Do you think that if I paint in sky midnight blue then do an orton action that will help
Denise,
It might; color would be better than white. But without clouds to provide texture I think it will still look blank. No clouds? Create your own! Here's an example, but you'll be able to do much better working from the original.
After you've created your mask for the sky (probably using select color range), do your painting or fill on a separate layer, set to "Color" blending mode.
Then add a new empty layer below the sky color layer. On this new layer run Filter > Render > Clouds, then copy the mask from the color layer (Alt-drag the mask from the color layer and drop it on the new Clouds layer in the layer pallet). In my example I set the clouds layer opacity to 67%, and used a color fill with a low-saturation light blue at 50% opacity.
If the clouds don't look right, run the filter again (and again...) - the results are pretty random - don't think the filter actually uses the current layer contents at all. You'll probably need to do a levels or curves adjustment on the clouds to brighten them & increase contrast; the filter output is pretty low-contrast. Play with the opacity on both the clouds and color layers, too.
It looks great I'll try it when I get home. Thanks! The clouds look real!
Nice composiation Denise, I like the reflection...the repost puts it over the top...:cool:
Denise, another cropping option would be to go just to the top of the smallest tree and crop there. I think Chris' cloud idea is great. Another thing I've done before is create a fill layer out of a solid color (sky blue) then mask off everywhere except where you want the blue to shine through. Sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't...
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