DPP: Exercise 22: Addition

Moving up the scale of alteration, we come to an exercise requiring the addition of something not in the original capture.  But we begin by producing an image similar to those in previous exercises employing post processing techniques to overcome the limitations of camera technology.


The brief calls for shooting a landscape with a cloudy sky.  As we are now into summer in Dubai and cloudy skies will not be seen again for some months, I have adapted the requirements (a scene with high dynamic range) to meet local conditions.

These images of a moon rise were taken less than a minute apart. Exposure was set manually.  I imported both to Ps, the lighter on top of the darker, and removed the sky from the upper layer, revealing the properly exposed moon.  I moved back into Lr, masked the sky to brighten, masked the mountains to darken, added contrast, and straightened.  I then went back into Ps for the Blur tool to smooth the mountain edges, then back to Lr to add a stroke and border before exporting to jpg.

This might not be the most efficient method for achieving these results, but I have only a few hours of Ps hours under my belt and still find the program difficult to navigate.  I have seen all kinds of really cool stuff done in tutorials, but then when I need to do something similar I'm stuck trying to remember how to proceed.

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The sky appears bluer in the darker image when viewed in blogger.  On my desktop or in Lr and Ps, the sky is much blacker.  I also produced a monochrome of the blend. 

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The second part of the brief is the more radical:  the substitution of a completely different sky (presumably from a different location and time).  Fortunately, I put this assignment away for a few days and in the interim did a Ps class at a local photography studio, where we did the following. 

Mosque corrected

sky

composite

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20 May 2014

Here is an example of a composite done on my most recent training course.  The only bit that is obviously lacking is the wing joint.  The design was not mine, but a reproduction based on five individual photos:  beach, scaffold, tower, elephant, and wings. 

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