[Rhodes22-list] Rhodes at Night - Second 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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