Falklands Memorial

Here is the story of the changes I made to a simple photo of the Falklands War memorial in Cathays Park in the Civic centre of Cardiff. The straight image was this one.

I took the image using the RAW setting on my canon 450D as I knew I was going to play around to get the result I wanted. The first thing I did was to save this RAW image as a jpg. Then I set the exposure to 1.5 stops over exposed and saved it as a second jpg. Finally I set it to be underexposed by 1.5 stops and saved it again.

under exposed and
             overexposed images





The next step was to use Photomatix to generate an HDR image of these three combined. This took the brightest of the overexposed and the darkest of the underexposed to create a shot with a wide range of exposure. It wasn't quite what i wanted so I played around with the tone mapping settings in Photomatix to create this result :-

By this stage the image was getting to look a little bit like the image I wanted. The next step was to put it onto a black background to provide a frame and to emphasise the deep colours in the image. I also wanted to identify the image and give it a title. I put it onto the pre prepared template that I use. The next step then looked like this. 

Notice that I didn't put it straight onto a black background, but added a slim white border to make a clear distinction between the image and the background. You will also see that I got rid of the very light sky behind the trees  in the background on the left hand side by using a layer and painting in a dark mask, then adjustuing the opacity until it was as dark as the surrounding sky.

What I wanted to finish off the image was to convert it to balck and white. For this I used the channel mixer rather than just clicking on a black and white conversion. This allowed me to adjust the tones in there and add even more dramatic contrast, especially to the sky.

After a little bit of playing around with the levels I finally got the image that had been in my mind's eye from the start. This is how it ended up.