I took this shot while waiting for my tram to come.
I loved the lighting and the forms that were created by it on the pavement, so I started shooting.

The problem was that there were people sitting on the left whose feet reached into the shot if I stood too far left. I had to move much further to the right than I wanted and even though I did so there was still on foot left in the image (left hand edge).

Postprocessing

The postprocessing started with brightening the entire image so that the dark parts were bright enough to see all the details in there.

As the next step, I stamped the foot on the left hand edge out, using the clone stamp.

I then used a color layer (new layer -> fill with color -> change layer style to color -> set opacity) with orange, to get this orange tint, that lets this image shine so much.

Afterwards I darkened the shadows using curves, to give them more contrast and to make the forms stand out more (rather then the structure in them).

Finally I cropped the shot on top and bottom, since those parts did not contain anything important, and distracted from the important central part.
I cropped it especially to let the background on the top edge disappear, because it misleaded the eye.

Thats it! I hope you like it!

Yours

CRAZY IVORY

Hover over the image to see the BEFORE version

Many people probably thought that this has to be a photo manipulation. OK guys, you are right. But nevertheless it was totally surreal to find a phone booth in the middle of nowhere.

The Processing

I created this image in three steps.

In the first step I created an HDR image of this scene.
On Location, I had shot three different exposures using high speed continuous shooting mode.
I took them without a tripod, so I had to overlay them in photoshop before generating the HDR.

In the second step I merged the sky of the HDR image with a single exposure shot for the lower half of the photo including the phone booth.
I did this using layer mask and brush tool.
I also increased the brightness and saturation of the lower image half, played with contrast and adjustment layer “selective color”.

The third step was cloning out the stone path and the alley in the background.
I did this partly using “Content Aware Fill” and partly by cloning per hand.

Thats it!
I hope you enjoy this BEFORE and AFTER, and if you are interested in a BEFORE and AFTER of a certain other shot of mine, dont hesitate to ask.

You can find my other BEFORE and AFTERS here.

Yay

Yours

CRAZY IVORY