DPP Exercise 14 Interpretative Processing

I chose an image that I had taken at the Blists Hill museum which is well worth a visit as there are so many photo opportunities.

This is an enhanced image that was processed largely in Camera Raw with a great deal of use of the adjustment brush particularly in darkening and partially desaturating the foliage that was too bright in the original and was a distraction. I also darkened the building on the right as well as the pathway to take the viewer into the image.

In this image I have attempted to use a sepia tone. I converted the image to a black and white using the Adjustment Black and White in Photoshop. I then used the tone dialogue to introduce the sepia eventually settling on  the R 138; G 118; B 87. I then used Hue/Saturation adjustment to lighten the tone until I achieved a satisfactory result.

The final image was created using Nik Silver Efex Pro software. The effect chosen was Antique Plate II. I accepted the default settings. I had tried all of the other alternatives to find what I considered the best effect before choosing the one shown.

Blists Hill is a 'living' museum that attempts to show life in the Victorian/Edwardian era. It was for this reason that I decided in the final two images to try and create the appearance of an old print. The first print, whilst a reasonable record of what I saw, did not capture 'atmosphere'. I tried a straight conversion to black and white using a range of methods including the gradient tool with the foreground set to black and white; the Black and White adjustment tool and simple conversion to Greyscale. Whilst all produced a closer version to what I was seeking none was satisfactory.

Sepia toning, that suggests the photograph was taken some years ago, is a common way of evoking a bygone age. Whilst I felt that it was closer to what I was trying to achieve I remained dissatisfied. It was difficult to pinpoint the reason why although I suspect it was the overall sharpness of the image. The depth of field was also something of a giveaway.

The third image is the one, by some distance, that I prefer. The image has the appearance of having been taken in the early days of photography. More importantly for me is the unexpected bonus of the light vignetting around the image that draws the attention to the bridge and what is beyond it. From a technical point of view it has a whole host of problems but for sheer impact it cannot be beaten.

The exercise particularly the method used in the final print does raise the question as to how far I can call these images mine. In the first two I have used the tools available to me in Photoshop to create the final images so my input is reasonably high although I have relied upon the 'shortcuts' or presets to achieve what I was after as quickly as possible. In the final image I have used powerful software in which my only input was to make a selection from a number of pre-sets. It was possible to change the pre-set in a number of ways that would have provided a slightly different image thus increasing the amount of 'me' in the image but it would have been marginal and in this case unnecessary.

I suppose that I could have achieved the final result without recourse to the Nik software but to do so I would have still been using a very powerful tool in Photoshop. It is an interesting dilemma.