Photos Possible POTM: Lower Essex Street.

Love it, fits the theme very well Nex'.

 

nice shot but could do with some gritty processing to get the most of the the brickwork and the texture in the wood

 

I like the take on the theme, and I think this shot is definitely in the right direction.

I think the left side needs to be burned in a little; it looks a bit overexposed. As far as the composition, you can probably come up a little bit from the bottom to the second row of black bricks above the grate. I don't think the grate adds much to the shot, and can disposed of easily. Next, come down from the top until you're just inside the red bricks (the ones that look like they have holes in them). This would make two natural vertical framing elements. Finally, it looks like the image is leaning a hair to the left. That last point could be me, though.

Good job.

-monkey

 

How about this?

 

I like it, but then again I love everything that's old and decaying

 

not being funny but they both look exactly the same

 

Spot the difference.

The second is cropped as suggested by supermonkey, and some subtle tweaking of the lighter areas on the left. To be honest, I'm still leaning towards the first version.

 

hope you dont mind i had a go



just a quick job but it shows you can get away with going much darker imo.

oh and not everyone has 42" monitors so no one will be able to see all of your image at once which i always feel distracts slightly from the image

 

Hmmm... the problem is that it loses detail on the right (although the left does look better). Better see if I can do a graduated fade of image layers in Paint.net. Otherwise let's see if the new Photoshop beta is out...

 

I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of playing with your photo a bit. If you don't approve just let me know and I'll edit this post accordingly.



In Photoshop, I used the guidelines and the rotate tool to level the image horizontally. I then used vertical guidelines and the distort tool to straighten up the vertical edges of the window. I then cropped it to get rid of any whitespace (from the rotation), and to create a natural vertical border.

I then used the Burn tool with a feathered brush and burned in the midtones on the left side, followed by the highlights. I then used the levels tool with a graduated mask to bring the entire left side down and smooth things out over the whole image. I went back over the right side with the Dodge tool to bring the leaves out just a bit. Finally, I used the Burn tool to darken the bricks bottom edge.

When I saw your original post, this is the image I saw in my mind.

-monkey

 

that is an awesome fix (by the way, all my images are published under creative commons so feel free to mess about with them --as long as nobody takes credit for the original, or uses for commercial gain). Unfortunately I only have Paint. Net...

The rotate and distortion tweaks are good but make the image appear a bit squashed vertically. However all it needs to correct this is to stretch it a bit.

 

Reminds me of Bioshock

Really nice picture

 

Very nice atmosphere to the shot (as said by many others before), but I really dislike the stretching. It just degrades the image quality (lack of sharpness/detail compared to the original) imho and doesn't look like something which has come out of a D80.

 

That is because I stretched the low resolution copy of the image as posted by supermonkey. The original is about seven times the resolution.

After all is said and done I still, on balance, prefer my original. I think that burning in the light areas of the image flattens is too much.

 

Nice shot Nexxo.

The actual sign is begging for a macro close-up.

 

Good point. Next time I visit the area.