[Rhodes22-list] Rhodes at Night - First attempt

[John Lock]

Hi Folks,

I spent 30 minutes or so making a pass at cleaning up Mike Cheung's 
photo of the R22 sitting amongst the big motor yachts.  There are 
many compelling elements in this photo and the results are pretty 
nice.  I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 for the retouching.  For those who 
want to follow along, here's what I did -

1) First problem was the excessive color noise caused by the camera 
sensor grasping every photon it could to make an image.  I used the 
"Noise" filter to remove selective amounts, fiddling with the 
controls to get the noise knocked back without losing detail.

2) Next challenge was how to get that nice cozy glow in the 
ports.  There was almost no data to work with in the R22 ports, so I 
had to borrow it from elsewhere.  Aha!  That yacht on the left has a 
nice glow, so I used the Clone tool to copy a portion of that glow, 
with a nice feathered edge, and stamped it into the Rhodes ports.

3) Technically, the poptop should have some light in it too (if the 
lights below are on).  Once more I used the Clone tool, but selected 
a darker section to copy so it looked more shadowed.  Never saw an 
R22 with a poptop at night, so I'm totally guessing at the amount of 
light here!

4) Next I started the Levels panel and brightened up the darker 
portions to bring out some detail.  Then I kicked up the midtones 
slightly so it didn't look quite so gloomy.

5) I tried to do some sharpening on the image, but because of the 
background noise and the filter's affect in masking it, there wasn't 
much left for the Sharpen filter to work with.  The rigging and dock 
lines got some better definition, but that's about it.

6) Lastly, I cropped off the railing in the foreground because it 
distracted from the overall composition.

Stan: if you want a larger version of this for printing I can send 
you one.  I don't know how well it will print, but it's probably 
worth a try.  It's a great photo, thanks Mike Cheung!

Cheers!

John Lock
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s/v Pandion - '79 Rhodes 22
Lake Sinclair, GA
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