Beyond the obvious

Sometimes it can be fun to think beyond the obvious when deciding on the look of a photo. The above image for example was taken on - believe it or not - a bright sunny day in Rotterdam. You can see the original here. While it was a nice architecture shapshot, I decided to see what else I could do with it.

Photography is often about leaving things out, and focussing on one particular thing. The original shot was quite cluttered, with lots of lines from the glass roof, the buiding, and the tree on the right hand side. So the first thing I did was crop the image to get rid of some of the distraction. A square format seemed to work well here.

Now it's time to get creative. The look I had in mind was a low-key image (with mostly dark tones), from which the subject emerges in subtle mid-tones, with some sharp highlights to emphasize the geometry and perspective. The first step in order to achieve this was to lower the exposure value in Aperture to darken the whole image. After that I applied two separate curves. The first curve is applied to the whole image and darkens most of the mid-tones, while lifting the brightest highlights intact (we want those for contrast after all).

The first curve darkens most of the image but blows out the brightest highlights

Now the building has become rather dark, so I created a second curve that was only applied to the building, using the brushes feature in Aperture. This lets you selectively post process certain areas of your image. The red area is where the curve is going to be applied. This second curve counteracts the first one and lifts some of the mid tones back up again.

The second curve selectively lightens the mid-tones. It's only applied to the red area.

I went for a monochrome look for stylistic effect and to make the image less busy. It's actually inspired by one of Christain Fletcher's images. Finally I played around with some noise reduction and the "skin smoothing" option. This last one is actually is not just useful to make skin look smoother in portraits. It comes in handy in all sorts of situations where you might have to remove some subtle but distracting elements, in this case some reflections in the glass roof.

Hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes post, even though it's a bit more technical than the stuff I usually post on the blog.