Walk through the light room

WOW, a long while has passed since I last posted something on the blog… With the exception of some pictures in the ‘Little worlds‘ gallery. I wanted to do this for a while, so here is an example of post-processing a picture. I hope you will find it useful.

Step ‘0‘ – obviously enough – involves taking the picture. In this, I was granted access to the rooftop of a building in the middle of the Central district in Hong Kong. Looking down towards Connaught Road, the traffic was an amazing mix of colors and ant colony activity.

Here is the original picture, step ‘1‘:

Step 1

Picked from a series of 5 pictures, there were still two things I disliked about that one. Firstly, the inevitable orange color cast, offered as usual with the compliments of the Street Lights Association of Hong Kong. Secondly, the – again with the compliments of the S.L.A. (H.K.) – the light post.

A workflow sample (commented)

The workflow is becoming more and more important in photography works and it remains a mystery for many amateurs. Having said that, I am no professional on both photography and workflows, but thanks to this book and a couple of years of experience, I arrived to the below workflow, and find it to work pretty well with & for Adobe Lightroom.

Note this is a picture-by-picture workflow! I use another workflow for stitching panoramas and for HDR.

Processing Workflow (4th Version)

Keep on reading for the walk-through.

of Diptychs and their working mechanics

I was recently going around the Web, taking a look at my blog(s), at Flickr and a couple of other websites.

On Flickr, I went through my groups and noticed one I’ve always liked : “Diptychs – two is better than one!” But in its ‘Pool’, I found a lot of inconsistency (in terms of visual impact) between the proposed works. On the same thought, I have noticed the Web is packed with “how-to” for Photoshop and the like, but not much words on the recipe that makes a great image, and in our particular case the diptych. So, here I expose some thoughts on what makes diptychs to work or not. It is just an attempt give some ideas and eventually inspire the readers. By no means I am in true science here, all come from personal observations.

Two Little Rides (by tubes. on Flickr)