Friday, November 20, 2015

How to go from Blah to Beautiful










During my visit to Provence, France I had the opportunity to photograph the 12th century church Saint Sixte Church.  Lighting wasn't optimal but I worked with what I had.  Voila! here's the final product.  So how did I make this with such harsh lighing conditions?









Here's the original image.
A little tilted, so I started out by cropping/straighening the image in Adobe Lightroom.  Then also in Lightroom I adjusted contrast, clarity, and vibrance.  Since I was exposing primarily for the sky the foreground is underexposed.  I used the shadow slider to open up the dark areas somewhat.











This type of lighting pretty much always causes chromatic aberration...color fringing along the edges of the tree limb.  Notice the purple on the bottom and green on the top.  I corrected this in Lightroom.




Still the photo is rather blah and lifeless so I took it into the new program from Topaz Labs called #Topaz Texture Effects.  This is the "Color Burst" preset which I loved.  It was still a little dark so I applied a curves adjustment and here ya go!

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