My first part of editing to this particular is cropping it, as I want to get the frame the right way I saw it originally back In New York, by this I mean crop part of the sky and also parts of a building that I believe won’t fit well with the rest of the editing.
And once again the next step is adjusting the photographs tone because the sky is lacking a lot of colour in which I need to bring into the photo to create the right atmosphere and also to create the best affect when applying HDR.
This is the final picture from the Photoshop edit as you can see I’ve brought back some colour in the photo but the rest has to be done through Adobe Lightroom as the software’s purpose is to edit colouring with photos.
The next piece of editing I am going to make is adjusting the brightness and contrast I have figured that if I decrease the slider for brightness like the screenshot below that Photoshop works on the shadows which is really important if I want to make this sky look more moody.
Fourth Edit
This is another shot that I took whilst I was in New York this time though I took it when I was on a ferry looking back at the cityscape. Before taking the photo I realised New York’s true beauty with its amazing skyline so I wanted to capture a shot that could kind of do it justice. I took into consideration my positioning and rule of thirds, for my positioning I stood at the end of the ferry where there was no objects that could block my view and placed myself right at the barrier of the boat. Then the rule of thirds took control I had to get as much of the skyline in the frame as possible making it look too cluttered so I set my manual focus and non-flash setting up and zoomed my 18-55mm lens in the furthest it could go so that I didn’t have too much of the water in the frame. Because of the amount of buildings and detail I was led to believe that this photo would be a good candidate for
my HDR selection because HDR really builds on detail and also colour within a photo. The focal point of this photo has got to be the buildings because they are the most in focus and have tremendous detail within them. But once again that doesn’t mean that this is the only view in the photo the water also plays a key part as you can see a slight reflection from the building which adds colour to help make the buildings stand out more and also the ferry that is positioned just in front of the building as it is a different colour which helps contrast the photo nicely and too conclude the ripples from the boats motor are also viewable which creates a nice effect for the photo. There are many aspects to this photo which I like, the first is the position and angle in which I have taken the photo I haven’t gone and placed myself right in front of the skyline which I could of done I decided to stand more to the left so that I could create a slight panoramic effect but once again this is me taking into consideration the rule of three and overall composition which all effect a photo in different ways. Another aspect I enjoy is the calmness of the water, even though you can see a few ripples they aren’t massive waves so when you look at the photo it gives an impression of calmness and tranquil rather than the stereotypical New York busy streets. One thing I don’t so enjoy though is the colour of the sky, it is very plain and dull so when editing this photo I will be concentrating on getting the best colours and affects into the sky and one other aspect is that some buildings haven’t fitted in the full frame so I will try and crop the buildings out but try to keep the effect I have made in this original shot.
This is the last piece of editing that I’m going to do on Photoshop and that is to adjust the Vibrance and Saturation and these two I would say are the most important because I have highlighted the shadows through adjusting the Brightness and Contra and now I need to bring all the colour back into the sky to create the moody effect I want to create.
The next editing section was Saturation I decided that I needed to increase quite a few colours to help increase the moodiness of the sky as when the original photo was show you could see there was no atmosphere within it.
Once again in Lightroom I increased all of the Hue section because I felt like the original photo lacked in a lot of colour so by increasing the Hue allows me get into the colours and create a good HDR photo.
The last bit of editing I made was with Luminance I needed to create the moodiness affect with the sky when I put the HDR effect on and the only way of doing that is by adjusting the Luminance in the photo.
This is my end product from all my editing I am very happy with what I have done as if you compare it back to the original it looks a lot different I have managed to create the moodiness I wanted in the sky and also contrasted it well to my other elements in this photo.