Time Immortal

This picture demonstrates the virtue of tinkering, I think.

This is another shot I took while Grace and I, along with her dad, sisters, and grandfather, were wandering around downtown Vancouver. It’s a decorative feature of the patio of the Fairmont Waterfront hotel (which was yesterday’s picture), a cascading waterfall and some curved terraces of grass.

Edit-wise, this shot began its trip through post-production normally enough. I applied the calibration/Punch preset that I always use, as well as some sharpening and a touch of noise reduction (I’m really picky about digital noise — even at ISO 200, I can’t resist trying to eliminate a bit of grain). I also adjusted a bunch of colour saturations, especially green (adjusted to +100) and yellow (adjusted to -100), in order to both narrow and accent the colour range apparent in the scene.

And then I decided to take it in a bit of a different direction.

Lightroom has a setting called “Clarity” which, if I understand it correctly, applies what amounts to a selective unsharp mask-derived contrast adjustment to only the mid-tones in the image (this is done, apparently, to avoid exacerbating noise in the image). Basically, it makes things a little bit “punchier,” for lack of a better term.

In Lightroom, “Clarity” can also be applied in reverse (or negative). This has a very strange effect, which some have compared to diffusion printing. It doesn’t exactly soften the image per sé, but it does…diffuse elements of the picture in a rather unique way.

That’s what’s on display in the image here. Initially, I had intended it just as an experiment. The results, however, surprised me; my jaw literally dropped when I saw what the “Clarity” adjustment had done for the image. I can’t quite put words to it, but there is just…just something about how it turned out that looks really, really good. And diffusing the image is what did that for it.

This is a technique I am going to have to remember.