timeimmortal

Of course, since we were in the vicinity of Coal Harbour, I had to stop and take a picture of some of the boats. Luckily, there were three rather colourful houseboats moored side-by-side in the harbour, which provided an easy subject.

Edit-wise, this picture actually presented me with a bit of a challenge. In particular, the background was a bit overexposed, and highlight reduction wasn’t reducing that as much as I might have liked. Playing with the shadow clipping helped somewhat, but even then left much to be desired. I applied the calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (I had the camera set at ISO 400, as it was getting a bit darker outside due to the rain), and some sharpening, all of which helped to improve the image in small ways.

But for the life of me I just couldn’t get the image to where I wanted it to be.

So I began to experiment. First, I tried applying some vignetting — that helped, somewhat, and made the overexposed parts of the border areas of the image more subdued. It also forced the viewer’s attention on to the boats themselves (a good side effect). But the background still flummoxed me.

So I tried shifting the Clarity of the image around a bit, finally ratcheting it all the way down to -100. This once again applied the “diffusion print” effect to the image…and made it just about perfect. The background suddenly looked good for its overexposure, because the details therein were a little less distinct in a hazy, ethereal sort of way.

I’m glad I read about that Clarity tool — it affords one a small toolset of handy tricks.

~ by Kenneth on April 21, 2008.