Brenda Fishbaugh, QPSA
May 2023 - Lighthouse in the Rain
Original
About the Image(s)
Canon R5 Tamron 15-30 wide angle handheld
ISO 50 15mm f/2.8 1/1600 sec
On our way home from Florida on 4/10/23, we stopped in St. Augustine to photograph birds at the famous Alligator Farm. It was pouring rain, so my husband suggested we skip getting rained on and tour the lighthouse museum.
I was sad, but went along with the warmer and dryer plan.
Walking into the museum, I saw this view and ran back through the rain to the car to pulled my camera and wide angle lens out. I'm against the museum door, not able to get further back, and of course, I got distortion.
As you can see by the original, there were a ton of signs, flower pots, people, ropes and a tent to the right! I spent hours trying to remove all the "distracting objects" (I had some other words for them!). I competed with the finished composition and won PSA Photo of the Day on the Facebook page.
I then saw a video on the NEW Photoshop BETA version, with better "distracting objects" removal. It took forever to figure HOW to get the Beta version, but once I had it, it did do a MUCH better job removing junk. Some things it excelled at removing and other simple things were perplexingly horrible. I used the patch tool and clone tool to supplement the NEW remove tool's magic. I recommend it, but only if you are adventurous and have nothing planned for the next two weeks.
I worked on several versions of this image, and I'm sure I'll start again once I get everyone's feedback.
It was easy to recover my dark sky. I got a heck of a halo around the lighthouse after selecting the lighthouse and darkening the sky, so I tried to clone along the lighthouse and was not entirely successful. I think it need to "contract" my selection a couple of pixels or more, so that there isn't a halo with the selection. I'd love some direction on how to do that and if it would be helpful here.
I used NIK Detail extractor to get the nice brick walk and details on the lighthouse, and removed Detail Extractor from much of the sky.
I used Photo AI to sharpen the lighthouse and remove cloud noise.
I tried several versions of a lighthouse top spotlight "on" and felt I didn't have it right, so left it off.
Thanks so much and I bet you are glad you didn't have to look at birds from me this month!
22 comments posted
I also believe the symmetry works great with this photo ... what does throw me off a little is the geometry ... unsure if it is just an artifact of the Tamron wide-angle lens you used or the angle of the shot... or both.
Finally, this photo could be really fun to play around with turning into a largely monotone photo, leaving just the roof of the keeper's quarters and the lantern room at the top colorized in red.
I played around with it a bit in Lightroom. First, I modified the geometry to make it feel a little more pleasing to my eye (+3 Distortion, -26 Vertical, -1 Horizontal, -1 Rotate, -100 Aspect, all others unchanged). I then constrained the crop to a standard 3:2 format and moved the crop around to compensate for some of the image loss resulting from modifying the aspect so much. Finally, I used Lightroom to desaturate every color to -100 except for Red.
Because there is some red in the brick, the pathway still has some color to it, but this could be fixed by using object selection when desaturating.
I've attached the result from this quick playing around with it so you can see what I'm trying to verbalize. Posted: 05/05/2023 06:09:19
Posted: 05/05/2023 08:54:28
Posted: 05/17/2023 15:55:42
The tower does have a tilt to the right, but its the leaning away that everyone is mentioning so I tried a quick transform to improve it. The curve on the top will take serious work to look right, so how much time do you have?
Also for me the grass is very muddy and for the pattern to come alive it needs to be consistent, maybe you can revisit when it's grown back.
Posted: 05/08/2023 09:56:05
Good picture, slightly oversaturated for my test and sky looks unnatural. This image has poster quality, print it, will look good on any wall. Posted: 05/11/2023 21:23:11
Jim explained how to use Warp to make the top of the tower bigger. Does my novice effort look believable?
I did soften the sky, as everyone suggested. And I went to monochrome, to hide the muddy grass that Terry mentioned. I thought mono would fix the sky and oversaturation issue.
I appreciate all the help! Posted: 05/17/2023 15:30:00
Posted: 05/19/2023 19:40:42