4 replies to this topic

[Merco_61]

Here we go, a bit late but I finally got the file.

 

First a message from this week's file submitter, Thumper.

This is a shot I took of a concert that was supposed to have been outdoors, but a thunderstorm rolled in that morning, so they moved the concert to the lobby of the office building that I work in.  I shot this from the 3rd floor looking down at the musicians and production staff.  

 

Have fun, and good luck!

 

Dropbox file:

Dropbox - D4X_8985.NEF - Simplify your life

 

 

 

 

And then the rules:

The exercise is weekly, a new thread with a new raw (preferably) or jpg fine file for each week.

The exercise officially runs until midnight between sunday and monday pst (UTC-8). Even after the official deadline, the exercise is still open for new interpretations.

This is a round-robin exercise, the order of submitting the week’s raw file is based on an alphabetical list of applicants’ user names. If the next submitter on the list is unable to post at his/her turn he/she may ask the thread master to be moved down the list no later than friday morning. Late applications will be added at the bottom of the list.

We will revise this when every applicant has had a go, and perhaps change this model.

 

The submitter for the week must make the file along with any specific text for the post available to the thread master during the weekend preceding the challenge week. The thread master will then copy the file to a Dropbox location for the challenge and make the starting post for the week.

 

The exercise is open to all members, not only the file submitters.

 

Images provided, as well as the images resulting from the exercise remain the sole property of the photographer who took them. Those participating in the editing exercise may not use or display the photo outside the exercise thread.

 

It is allowed to make derivative interpretations on other participants’ work (a collaborative approach). If you base your take on someone else’s work, you must indicate what you started from.

 

The owner of the photo comments on the work done, highlighting what he liked best (both the interpretation itself and the technique used to get there) after the original week is over.

 

As this exercise is a tool for learning and inspiration, multiple entries are not only ok, but encouraged if a participant gets a new idea for how to present or interpret the photo, including artistic interpretations.

 

Participants must share how they have achieved their take on the photo.

 

 

Participants are explicitly not limited as to what software is used for the exercise.

 

 

[Malice]

First up, thanks to Thumper for sharing this nice image, which in my opinion offers a lot of opportunities to work with.

 

The intention behind my processing direction is to give a little something back to the band after this stroke of bad luck, which forced them to move inside to an improvised stage. Meaning, I was trying to put the band into the center of perception and reduce the effect of the surroundings. At the same time I thought, maybe they would have preferred to appear a bit later on stage as it is usually the case for headlining bands during a music festival.

 

As usual, I started out in Lightroom 4, with the following activities and settings:

* Square crop (to remove as much of the surroundings, without losing the stage)

* Brush over the complete lefthand side of the stage (excluding the two leaves sticking into the scene) to reduce brightness (-1.0), highlights (-50) and shadows (-50), to get the stage hand into the background.

* As this created a halo like rim around the lefthand side of the bass player, I brushed over this rim again, trying to get the stark contrast out of this transition (Clarity -100 and Sharpening -100).

* Since I found the glazed brick tiled floor (whatever the correct term for that is) too dominant, I applied a graduated neutral density filter. The center line of the filter lies parallel to the bottom of the backdrop and has brightness setting of -3.00.

* Set White Balance to the "Shadow"-Preset (7500 K, toning +10) to get a little warmer evening-like feel

* The remaining settings in LR4 are: Highlights -25 (the lamp on the lower right was a bit strong) and I raised the blacks to +50 to get a little bit of separation between the two guy in black shirts and the backdrop.

 

> Export as TIF

 

In Color Efex Pro 4 I applied a lens vignette filter to further draw the focus to the band. Settings: Amount -25%, completely circular, size 50%

 

To round the whole image out, I applied some sharpening with Sharpener Pro 3 Raw Resharpening (default settings) and some noise reduction with Dfine2 (default settings).

 

And here is what I came up with:

 

 

 

And just for a little bit of fun (actually I've been dying to finally try this filter out! :-) ), I've also made a second version with the graduated fog filter in Color Efex Pro 4. It's totally plausible to have a fog machine on stage, right? So, yeah, don't take this one too seriously, it's just an attempt at humor:

 

 

The settings for the fog are: Fog method 1, Opacity 66%, Blend 50%, Vertical Shift 33%, Rotation 0°

 

 

Thanks again and have a nice weekend.

[Merco_61]

A challenging exercise.

 

Basic edits in Capture NX-D.

Crop to 5:4.

Changed Picture Control to [PT]Portrait.

Changed ADL to normal from off.

Lowered overall exposure 1/3 step.

 

Over to PS CC for further edits.

Cloned out the stage hand on the left.

Duplicated the background layer to adjust the white blob of a lamp.

Selected the lamp with the magic wand tool, inverted the selection and deleted everything but the lamp globes.

In the colour balance toolbox, I activated the settings for highlights and nudged the C-R slider over towards red and the Y-B slider towards yellow. This gave a slightly warmer tone to the lamp.

 

The monochrome is made with this recipe in SEP.

 

 

Shane, thank you for letting us play with this. 

[Bart]

I agree with Peter. I found it challenging because of the distracting elements and the lights in front of the 3rd player.

The distracting elements can for a part be eliminated by cropping them out for the most part. But then I thought that the band had to perform in a less than optimal environment.

So, I decided to work toward a compromise: eliminating some of the distractions but keeping some of the surroundings in to bring back the memory of "the performance when we had to take shelter from a thunder storm" 

I guess it's rather unusual to have a band perform in the lobby as well. So, another incentive to keep enough of the surroundings in to recognize the lobby of your office building.

 

I started in DxO Optics, camera lens module applied, colour rendering by camera model. I applied a slight perspective correction on the verticals. Switched to "prime" noise reduction.

And these settings (easy on contrast and enhancement)

 

 

With this intermediate result:

 

 

I intended to use a film emulation in DxO FilmPack to "enhance" colours and contrast so, I picked Fuji Velvia 50

with some corrections on lighting as a result.

 

 

 

 

Again starting from the DxO output, I opened in Silver Efex for a b&w.

I suspected this would prove difficult because the background and the shirts would tend to melt together in b&w.

I tried to remedy this with quite a number of control points (local adjustments).

Hard to show this but these are the general settings I used:

 

 

 

 

 

I prefer my colour version but I thought I'd share the b&w anyway.

 

 

Thanks, Thumper for providing us this unusual image to work on!

 

 

[Thumper]

Wow, y'all did some amazing work with an absolutely terrible shot.  I had an awful time trying to shoot this because at the time of the event, there was someone involved with the event that was intentionally standing in front of all of my shots so that I couldn't get shots of the band.  I finally went back up to the floor that my office is on in this building, and shot down from the 3rd floor.  (Once she saw me up there, she started doing her little routine of trying to obstruct my shots).  So I ended up taking the shot from an odd vantage point farther away than I would have preferred.  But I did give y'all a terrible shot to work with.  

 

The original shot was taken with my D4 with the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens. 

f/5

1/100s

ISO 1600

 

I loaded the .NEF file into Lightroom:

Reduced the Highlights and Shadows to reduce the contrast without reducing the Contrast (which affects things much more overtly).

Popped the Sharpening up a bit to give a little detail and a bit of grain (but not too much).

 

Then I exported the file and loaded it into Photoshop.

I cropped it down to what I felt was a little more usable, but I ended up making it a bit cramped, and I lost parts of the musical instruments.

I applied Silver Efex Pro 2, and I chose the High Structure (Smooth) template.

I increased the Brightness.

I increased the Contrast.

I increased the Structure.

I was pretty much done with it at that point, but then I noticed that the event staff member behind the bass player was really bothering me, so I made him disappear.  I should have done that before I had done anything in Silver Efex Pro 2 because I lost my continuity of the effect at that point, and I couldn't salvage it at that point without starting all over again (which I, admittedly, should have done).  

 

But what I wanted was a bit of a Tri-X Pan look, and I think I got that, for the most part.

 

 

 

 

And y'all were far too kind in your descriptions of my raw file submission.  It was an awful shot.