For my final image I decided to try and do something a little different. I wanted to demonstrate the "frame within a frame" technique. This involves taking a picture from behind a framing object, such as a doorway, archway or window etc, and using this object as a frame for the focal point of the photograph. Ok, so that's a pretty bad explanation of the concept of the technique, but if done properly, it can look very effective.
In the end, I decided to keep the architecture theme throughout the project. But for my final image, I turned to something a bit more traditional, rather than modern office blocks like in the other photographs. A lot nearer to home, my final image is of Lincoln Cathedral. As mentioned above, I tried to create a frame within a frame shot of the building and I got some impressive results.
Here is the original photograph:
The frame of the photograph was very dark, so the first thing to do was to try and highlight parts of the stone. To do this I began by making two layers from the image. I cut the middle of it out and created a new layer with it. Doing this meant I could highlight just the frame (window), which was now in a frame of its own. Photoshop has a built in Highlights and Shadows editor, and adjusting the Highlights shadow to around 50%, I managed to bring out the stone detail of the window very well indeed. The results of this are shown below:
Creating two layers from the original shot created some very thin lines round the middle of the picture, and you could quite clearly see where the middle had been cut out. To repair this problem, I flattened the image and used the Clone tool to patch up the gaps. Whilst using the clone tool, I got rid of a fairly obtrusive weed from the right hand side of the shot. Compare the image above with the results of my repairs below:
From here, I was slowly getting nearer to completing the image. The next stage was to crop out any parts of the image that needn't be there, so I took out the edge of the window frame. This wasn't a major change to the photograph, but helped bring out the focal point a bit better. With the cropping done, the image now looked like this:
I could have left the completed image like that, but you can see how grim the day was! So, like in all the other project photos, I decided that the day definitely needed brightning up. If i'd have realised how much of a hard job it was going to be with this shot, I might not have bothered! It took a very long time because of all the intricate detail around the top of the cathedral building. But after much perseverance and hard work, the sky became blue again. As with the previous three files, I created a new layer and painted over the sky with a nice blue colour, before setting the layer blend parameter to Overlay.
Because I'd made the sky blue, the rest of the picture looked a bit dull, so to fix this I adjusted the colour balance. Now whether or not I did this effectively is judged by yourself, but I think it looks better with the colour balance adjusted. I boosted the yellows slightly, because that's what "colour" the sun makes things look. So adding a few yellow highlights to the image brightened the whole thing up. I hope you agree that the completed picture looks a lot better than the original. The image was also resized, as it did not need to be as big as it was originally (over 3000 pixels high!). Below is my final submission to BigStockPhoto!!
In the end, I decided to keep the architecture theme throughout the project. But for my final image, I turned to something a bit more traditional, rather than modern office blocks like in the other photographs. A lot nearer to home, my final image is of Lincoln Cathedral. As mentioned above, I tried to create a frame within a frame shot of the building and I got some impressive results.
Here is the original photograph:
The frame of the photograph was very dark, so the first thing to do was to try and highlight parts of the stone. To do this I began by making two layers from the image. I cut the middle of it out and created a new layer with it. Doing this meant I could highlight just the frame (window), which was now in a frame of its own. Photoshop has a built in Highlights and Shadows editor, and adjusting the Highlights shadow to around 50%, I managed to bring out the stone detail of the window very well indeed. The results of this are shown below:
Creating two layers from the original shot created some very thin lines round the middle of the picture, and you could quite clearly see where the middle had been cut out. To repair this problem, I flattened the image and used the Clone tool to patch up the gaps. Whilst using the clone tool, I got rid of a fairly obtrusive weed from the right hand side of the shot. Compare the image above with the results of my repairs below:
From here, I was slowly getting nearer to completing the image. The next stage was to crop out any parts of the image that needn't be there, so I took out the edge of the window frame. This wasn't a major change to the photograph, but helped bring out the focal point a bit better. With the cropping done, the image now looked like this:
I could have left the completed image like that, but you can see how grim the day was! So, like in all the other project photos, I decided that the day definitely needed brightning up. If i'd have realised how much of a hard job it was going to be with this shot, I might not have bothered! It took a very long time because of all the intricate detail around the top of the cathedral building. But after much perseverance and hard work, the sky became blue again. As with the previous three files, I created a new layer and painted over the sky with a nice blue colour, before setting the layer blend parameter to Overlay.
Because I'd made the sky blue, the rest of the picture looked a bit dull, so to fix this I adjusted the colour balance. Now whether or not I did this effectively is judged by yourself, but I think it looks better with the colour balance adjusted. I boosted the yellows slightly, because that's what "colour" the sun makes things look. So adding a few yellow highlights to the image brightened the whole thing up. I hope you agree that the completed picture looks a lot better than the original. The image was also resized, as it did not need to be as big as it was originally (over 3000 pixels high!). Below is my final submission to BigStockPhoto!!
| Before | After |
|  |
I couldn't decide whether it looked better with the colours balanced differently or not. I tried my best to warm the image up but don't know if I went the right way about it. I got the best results I could so feel free to leave me comments about this photograph. I used a number of editing tools and still think I ended up with a very impressive completed photo.
So that's it for the BigStockPhoto project as far as taking and editing images is concerned. The next posts explain how each image was uploaded, and whether or not it was accepted. I have also posted a detailed look at file types.
So that's it for the BigStockPhoto project as far as taking and editing images is concerned. The next posts explain how each image was uploaded, and whether or not it was accepted. I have also posted a detailed look at file types.
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