This was taken on a trip to Ottawa over the summer. Actually this breathtaking view of Canada’s parliament buildings in Ottawa was taken from across the river at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, QC. The outside of the museum is chock full of amazing pictures like this one. 
This is another entry in Carmi Levy’s Thematic Photographic: Travel. Here’s how it works.
Archive for the ‘hdr’ category
A summertime trip to Ottawa
November 17th, 2009Selective colour sewing machine
September 19th, 2009I played around with this for quite a while, before the simple solution struck me. I was trying all kinds of ways to remove the color info from everywhere but the flowery decorations on the sewing machine. Selecting the flowers, or everything but the flowers was not giving me the results I wanted and it was tedious work. Then I decided to try a completely different tack. As you’ll see, I removed all the color info and then painted it back in using a layer mask. This is also a single exposure HDR image. I think the only real sign of that (the HDR-ness) is in the sky and maybe a little more detail in the shadows (eg: the spinning handle/wheel)
Make the jump to see how I did it
- In Lightroom, I created two virtual copies of the image. On one, I decreased the exposure by 3 stops, on the other I increased it by 3 stops.
- I imported them into Photomatix 3 and processed using tone mapping, nothing too dramatic.
- I then imported the image into Photoshop
- As always, convert image to LAB color and sharpen only the Lightness layer using Unsharp Mask. Then return to RGB color mode. (PS action here)
- Brightness/Contrast layer to increase brightness and contrast (worked better than levels for some reason)
- Used separate hue/saturation layers to boost the colors: green, yellow, red.
- Used a hue/saturation layer to remove the blues. There were no blues in the flowers, so it didn’t matter there, but it did help later when trying to remove the color from everything else, since the black of the sewing machine had a bit of a blue tinge.
- Used a hue/saturation layer (let’s call it b/w) to remove all color (slide saturation all the way to the left)
- Then I painted the color back into the flowery decorations. I did this by painting with black on the b/w layer mask. First I did a rough, largish brush paint over the entire flowered area, then I zoomed in and painted out any bluish tinge left behind after the hue/saturation layer two steps ago that removed most of the blues. I did this by painting with white on the b/w layer mask on any bits of blue I saw.
- I also cropped slightly, tightening up the right side of the image.
