Aug 22, 2010 Posted on Aug 22, 2010 | 3 comments

50/365 – County Fair, Before & After

Washington County Fair, Utah – 8/11/10

After:

Before:

Before w/notes:

Photos by Regina Pagles

Here’s a list of some post processing I did:

• Masked the building, so I could make adjustments to the background without affecting the building and vice versa
• Applied Calvin Hollywood’s ‘Calvinize’ technique to the building only to bring out the details
• Blurred the background using OnOne’s Focal Point Plug-In for Photoshop
• Removed imperfections on the ground  and on the top right using the Healing Brush
• Darkened the handle on the building’s right side with a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, selected w/the  Quick Select tool
• Dodged & burned the sign with a separate fill layer of 50% gray set to Overlay blend mode to deepen the shadows and bring out the highlights
• Used Auto FX Mystical Lighting Plug-In to add some haze & fog to the foreground, which is hardly noticeable now after all the other processing
• The building looked a bit too ‘crisp’ after adding the haze & fog, so I Used OnOne’s Photo Tools Plug-In to add a slight ‘glow’ to the highlights, to blend the building into the background a bit more
• Used a Color Balance adjustment layer in PS to add a cross processed look that I am very fond of
• Lightened the black vehicle in the background with Nik Software’s Vivesa Plug-In
• Applied several separate ‘Lighting Effects’ filters to smart layers, some to the background and some to just the building
• Used an Aurora Borealis shaped brush (from DeviantArt) on a separate layer, blend mode set to Overlay, on the glass windows to brighten things up a bit
• Added a vignette on a separate layer set to Soft Light blend mode, then used a gradient on a mask to lessen the vignetting on the bottom and right sides
• Flattened the image and then rotated and cropped at an angle
• Saved as a PSD file
• Reduced the image size to 800 px wide then duplicated the Background layer, converted it to grayscale and applied a High Pass sharpening filter to it and set the blend mode to Soft Light
• Saved the smaller version as a jpeg at 180k for the web

I am sure that there are some steps I have forgotten to include.  I’d say I tweaked this photo for about 5 hours, so alot can happen in that time. Most of that time goes into moving sliders around to see the effects, and then scrapping them.

For me, it more about mastering Photoshop, then the end photo result. If I can at least learn something new, no matter how small, that’s significant in my quest to improve my skills.

Hope I may have helped someone.

3 Responses to “50/365 – County Fair, Before & After”

1. Carol J Watkins says:

   August 22, 2010 at 10:42 am

   No wonder your images look so great. Your really put a lot of hard work into them.
2. david says:

   August 28, 2010 at 10:33 am

   regina,
   i love your work, especially the landscapes. i was in zion twice this summer for the first time. i was there with my son’s school camping trip and loved it so much i brought the rest of my family back 2 weeks later. we share some similar imagery tastes, looks like.

   here are a couple of mine that remind me of your county fair.
   i too am a huge fan of rarindra’s.
   i’ll come by the bike shop next time.

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/clavpix/1835679172/
   http://www.flickr.com/photos/clavpix/2501452348/
   cheers, david
3. Agape says:

   October 1, 2010 at 12:14 pm

   Incredible, incredible photos! Wish I knew a penny in the bucket of what you know and can do to create such beautiful artwork. Lovely, lovely, lovely!