Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear

Here's one of mine.

This is the original raw file as it opened in Adobe Camera raw without any adjustments. Obviously some fill flash, and maybe a polarizer would've been the right way to do it.



Here's what I ended up with. This is several years old so I don't remember exactly what I did, but I know it involved masking together several different versions of the original raw file, converting the image to BW using several different channel mixer recipes, and then masking them together, and probably way too much fiddling with the local contrast using curves and USM.



I do like the tweaked one better than the straight original, but it would've looked nicer (and been much easier to do) with some fill flash in the first place.

 

I'll bite on this one. I realize when shrunk this far though, the 'new' version looks overly sharp (at 6x9 printed, it's not).



And after the photoshop session:

 

Great job, Rufus... You did superb with the hue and contrast.. Looks like an HDR..

 

I find that using the shadow/Highlight tool is very useful in creating photos like this, almost an HDR feel.

 

I'm pretty sure that's about 99% curves work though I may have dropped the highlights with the shadow/highlight tool. The haze was dispensed with in ACR by bumping the blacks up to about 15 or so I think (which naturally saturates things a bit by itself). I didn't take notes, unfortunately. The sharpening was 4.0 high pass on a second layer with a 70% vivid light blend.

 

Oh hell, here's another:



Crop, adjust, heal, clone, sharpen, color correct, etc, etc. later:

 

Rufus, you're the man, but I believe he's looking for crap photos being turned into gold.. Your first post was a crap photo and ended up gold, but this one kinda started out at least silver..

 

The composition in the second one clearly qualifies it as 'a crappy snapshot'

 

Maybe, but since a mere crop would have made it great....

 

I think you and I have radically different ideas of what 'great' means

 

Of course photos of our beautiful kids aren't crap shots, but I think fixed up snaps are the perfect example. That's when I'm most likely to be tempted to slack at the time of exposure, and try to fix it up later.

A photo that was taken with specific processing or tweaking in mind would not be eligible. If you previsualize the processing it's no longer "fixing it up" it's processing as planned.

Previsualization

I think Rufus 5150 has done a great job fixing up both of these photos. They are both definitely better looking than the originals, although I think they still fall within the realm of nice snapshots. With the fixing up they will be snapshots that might get printed and enjoyed, or put up on a family photo album website; left as originally shot they would languish on the hard drive.

By they way, I am not dogging on snapshots. My snapshots of my kids and family are some of the best photos I've ever taken. When I say snapshot I mean a photo taken without much thought beyond "Hey that looks good, snap!"; definitely no previsualization.





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Off hand I don't remember exactly what all I did, but I know I increased the contrast on the statue, increased saturation on the sky and cropped it. Not overly ecstatic about the final result, but it's at least decent now.