articles/Post-Processing/post-pro-p3-page3

The First Stage of Post-Processing Part 3 - part 3 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2015

You can see that any features in the selection are stretched as well. So the rocks under the water now appear as lines in the area that has been stretched. Clearly this is not very good, so we will have to go in and using the Healing brush or Clone tools go over these areas to remove these effects.

[I could still see some very light lines in the water to the right of the main area I had just fixed; so I used the BLUR tool just to dampen these down. These were not visible in the reporduction - Ed]

I am still not satisfied with the overall composition. There isn't enough space between the main rocks and the left hand side of the frame. In much the same way I have extended the bottom part of the image, I am going to repeat this on the left-hand side of the image.

One of the Adjustment Layer Masks highlighted (red frisket) along with the curve adjustment applied to 'enhance' the rocks.

Now we have sorted out the overall composition of the image we can set about post processing the images. This won't take much work, although it did involve 13 Adjustment Layers. Simply reduce the brightness of the sky and bring a little more contrast to the main rocks. I used selections and curve adjustment layers to do this.

So there we have it. The finished image. It would have been better to have got this all correct when in the field. These sorts of techniques will only work, as in this image, if the edges of the canvas do not have too much detail in them. If we had trees or buildings adjacent to the frame then we would be stuck. As I mentioned in my first article 'Why Post Process', post processing informs our field craft. Next time I will take better care.

The images used in this feature were all shot in the Kintyre area of Scotland. Michael PIlkington and Paul Gallagher of Aspect2i were running a course up there as we went to press and so we hope to include some of the images in the next issue of Professional Imagemaker.

• The First Stage of Post-Processing Part 3 page 1
  
• The First Stage of Post-Processing Part 3 page 2
  
• The First Stage of Post-Processing Part 3 page 3
  

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