RPS Digital Imaging Group eCircle Boats Photograph (a technical post)

This week we had another meeting of the eCircle processing group of which I am a member. For this meeting we used a photograph provided by ‘Andrew’ (he has given me permission to use his photo in this post but it is still his copyright). Andrew provided a scene of some small yachts moored in a calm location

Here I will show the stages I went through to get the final image. First, I show the unprocessed RAW image:

Unprocessed Raw image as the starting point
This image had basic exposure adjustments made and was cropped

In western counties we tend to read photographs as we read from left to right. Those countries where right to left writing is the norm tend to read photographs in that way. So I flipped the image left to right. As it happens I wasn’t the only one to do this!

Now flipped left to right
I thought some sepia toning would be appropriate…
I tried a vertical crop

At this point I thought I had a fair interpretation of the photo but thought I could go further so I then tried applying some of the ‘old photo’ effects I described last month:

Here I applied the photo frame and a little negative clarity to soften slightly the image
For this one I added some stone texture and a little blurring
Finally I changed the blending mode of the viewfinder and tweaked the exposure

In the discussions, it was felt that the cropping was too tight to the left and right and that the texture was too large and too strong. Afterwards I tried a quick edit and came up with this:

Viewfinder frame stretched out and stone texture adjusted.

If I was to start from scratch I could have produced a better image but it shows that the cropping was too tight as originally done, and that I need a finer stone texture layer.

Finally, for completion I show a screen shot of the Photoshop layers: