Gabriel Van Wyhe Photo Blog » Sharing life through images

So Today’s Blog entry is a first for me.  I am diverging from my typical posts on weddings, seniors and families I have photographed and participating in a photo edit project.  The idea of doing before and after examples of shots I’ve taken and worked on is a great concept – However, I just haven’t really had a good reason for doing it in my blog before.  Well, now I do – a good friend of my and fellow photographer, John Huson, has a photo of himself up on the Epic Edits website for others to take and edit the original.  Although this isn’t a photo I’ve taken, I figured it would be a fun opportunity to participate and show a before/after shot.

Here is the ORIGINAL image submitted for others to edit.  A couple of notes on the image: the sharp focus of the image is on the wall, pulling out details like the heart and names scratched in on the upper left of the image.  However, this actually has left John in a slightly softer focus – any treatment of the image will be affected by this.  There are several diagonal shadows that have huge potential for adding strong drama to the image if brought out.  Also, the image has a very strong grungy urban feel to it (minus the athletic tennis shoes) that seems to draw the image, in my mind, towards a certain look.  My first thought is that any treatment of the image should capture the intensity.  See below the original for my edited image.

A couple of notes on my final edit below:  First, I needed to figure out where to crop the image.  I was very tempted to crop out the shoes in order to bring a greater balance to the grungy/urban feel – however, wanting to keep the image at an easily printable set of dimensions, the crop would have lost too much of the image, including ground and more wall than I was willing to lose.  I did a slight crop in order to place John where I wanted him in the image, but noting extensive.  Using a combination of the black slider, recovery light, contrast and fill light adjustments in Adobe’s Lightroom 2, I brought out the details of the wall.  The coloring is a combination of many adjustments: I increased the white balance temp, significantly increased the vibrance, reduced overall saturation while moving the red hues of the image towards a rusty orange color.  In the Tone Curves, I dropped the darks and slightly brightened the shadows.  Also, using split tones the orange of the highlights was increased.  Finally, there was some sharpening and some hard vignetting added to increase the dramatic feel of the diagonal shadows. I had considered adding some texture to the image, however, I decided that it would push the image into a busy feel that would take the focus away from some of the more subtle details.  I actually really like the soft focus John has in the fianl image as it is a great contrast from the sharp details and strong focus on the wall.  Admittedly, the image has a slight HDR feel to it with this editing, but I feel like it fits well for this picture.

You can check out John Huson’s blog by clicking here:  John huson.