One Photo Focus. Brightening & Darkening at the Same Time.

This month’s One Photo Focus features a wonderful photo from Stacy at Learning to See Light.

This glorious boat in Melbourne caught my eye and I wanted to bring out the boat more, but not lose the clouds in the process. Fortunately, Stacy shot it in RAW, which allows for more control over the two different lighting needs between the boat and sky.

The first step in this process is to open the photo in RAW. If you look at the screen shot below, you will see that there are several options to tweak. All you have to do is slide the levers to the right or left to change them.

In this case, I wanted to add more light to the boat to bring out the colors and features. To do that, all I had to do was slide the Fill Light option to the right. To bring out the details in the clouds, the Recovery lever was slid to the right.

I also adjusted the Saturation and Vibrance to boost the colors a bit more to make the boat stand out and be more vivid.

After that, I opened the photo in Photoshop CS5. From there, I made two layers of the photo. In one, decreased the brightness. That brought out the clouds more and made them more intense. I placed that layer behind the brighter boat layer, in which I erased out the clouds out of. This allowed me to have the deep intense clouds with the brighter boat at the same time. So, I merged those two layers together into one photo.

With that, I did some slight adjustments to the brightness and saturation and decided that was enough.

What do you think? Have any questions? I think I like the intense clouds, but I think the buildings in the background could probably be toned down some. However, that was a lot of small detail work that I was not ready to do. So, I left it as is. Either way, it is a grand boat fore sure.

Thanks for letting us work on your photo Stacy (at Learning to See Light).

Props go out to another Stacy too though. Stacy at Visual Venturing is the host of the One Photo Focus each month. Her post will not only show you her edits on the Melbourne boat photo above, but also the edits and links to other photographers submissions as well. It is rather interesting to see all the different editing options on one photo.

To get more info on One Photo Focus, just go to Stacy’s guidelines page…and then join the fun.

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