Chromasia Training Gallery

Beach Fun

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:02:27 +0200

This photo was taken right around sunset at Kovalam Beach in Kerala (India), the land of coconut trees! The kids playing in the water caught my eye and in my opinion that what makes this a strong image. I was walking on the beach with my family and within minutes of this capture the weather changed and we all got drenched in a big storm before we could take cover. I converted the original RAW file into B&W and added some curves to adjust the contrast. Finally I added a Color Efex Pro filter to create the "diffused" look on the water.

Lost and Found

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:33:36 +0200

Sometimes when I go out to jog I have my camera with me, of course instead of jogging I just walk and look for something to photograph, that day I saw this doll and to me it was unusual so I spent a little while shooting it, anyway, almost all people always says "that's ugly" or "I dont like it! It's creepy", but it's one of my very favs :) Postprocessing was done with 7 curves layer; six to adjust contrast, 1 vibrance layer to mute the colors and the last curve to tone colour the image.

Freelensed Eye

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

The photo was taken with an old minolta lens, held by hand in front of the camera body with a black piece of cloth over my head and arm to avoid light leaks. The aim was to get a tilt-shift effect with a very narrow DOF, which worked out nicely, though it did take 212 attempts to get there. The lighting was a big studio light behind a translucent umbrella. The post-production took 5 additional layers: A copy of the content with the red area under the eye removed (using the stamp tool in hue mode), a soft light layer to lighten some darker areas around the eye, an unmasked curves layer for contrast, brightness and tone, a masked curves layer for the iris contrast and a vignette.

Defeated

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

Nikon EM Nikon AIS 135 2.8 @ 2.8 Shutter I have no idea - probably around 1/125 or more. Expired Ilford HP5+ in DDX - scanned on a Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED. Date would be sometime in 2009.

Radiant Metro

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

This HDR image was processed with 3 exposures and with 1 adjustment curve. For more info, visit my blog below: http://blog.baberafzal.com/2010/12/30/radiant-metro/

Assured

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

The image was taken indoors with a bay window behind me. I bounced the flash off the ceiling to reduce any shadow. Post production: I used three adjustment layers for this image as follows: firstly, I applied a levels adjustment to make the background white. I then added a channel mixer adjustment layer and set this to monochrome with Red @ +100 with green and blue channels set to 0 – this layer was used to soften the skin tones and was set to 66% opacity. Finally I added a curves layer to adjust the contract. That’s it! Hope you like the result.

End of the bridge

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

This was taken at a small park near where I live in Southwestern Ontario, Canada (specifically, Cambridge, Ontario http://g.co/maps/69ka ). Oddly, I did not use my go-to camera, the Canon 7D, to take this frame, as it had my long lens on. I pulled the small Canon Digital Rebel with 10-20mm Sigma wide attached from the bag to take this shot on a whim because I liked the near symmetry of the bridge. Raw processing done in Apple Aperture, then exported through to Photoshop. Processing steps included:

removing some unwanted elements from the frame (the caution tape and some graffiti) using cloning.
layer mask to process sky separate from foreground.
various luminosity masks to process the different parts of the image.
Some selective masking to bring out the texture in the wood on the bridge.
a slight vignette.
sharpening using a high-pass filter in Photoshop.

St. Michaels Wedding

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

This image was taken in St. Michaels, MD, USA at the rehearsal dinner of wedding that I was covering. Most of the adjustments for this image were done in Camera Raw. Fill light slider and some curves adjustments did most of the work. Subtle tweaking of the HSL sliders to adjust the colors and the straighten tool to adjust the horizon slightly. In PS I used a gradient to bring the sky back down a bit a composited in a shot of the moon also taken that same night with my meade telescope.

Carolina Beach

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

I took the shot on Carolina Beach on the day Hurricane Irene was moving up the East coast of the U.S, we had taken the brunt of it all night on the coast. We don't often get thick cloud cover here, so I headed to the beach and saw this couple walking along with their bright rain coats, I thought the little pop of colour would make a good picture with the muted colours of the backdrop. I used in total 6 curves for processing.

Vallée de l'Ubaye - Les Alpes - France

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

I've processed it with Lightroom, when I took the image I wanted to keep a maximum amount of information. In post processing, the first thing I did was to convert to black and white, thanks to the Black & White Mix. I then adjusted the basic curves: Exposure, Blacks, Contrast. And the tone curves: Lights, Shadows. I wanted a dramatic effect, but keeping a maximum amount of details in the subtle gradients of haze. The last part was to adjust the clarity, to have more details in the haze. Then I used a graduated filter to darken the sky, in the top left corner, plus a slight Post-Crop Vignetting on the whole image.

Brighton Beach

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

This was shot on Brighton Beach and the pier is in the background. I was taken with the fact that it appears be a French bottle so had made the lonely trip across the channel. Unfortunately no message in it. The shot was rubbish and over exposed but I like the composition so with the miracle of RAW and tone mapping a nice image appeared. It was tweaked in ACR then imported as a 16 bit TIFF into Photomatix Pro for tone mapping. Finished in Photoshop CS3 with curves.

Timisoara - Union Square at sunset

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

The image was taken in February 2011 in the city of Timisoara, Romania. I used bracketing to get 5 exposure and then I blended two of them in Photoshop (+1EV and -1EV) in order to extend the dynamic range. For blending work flow I used my personal Channel Masks technique improved with Tony Kuyper's Luminosity Masking technique. Adjustment layers for saturation and contrast finalized the image.

Contraluz

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0200

This image was taken in Viña del Mar, Chile. Post-processing was ND digital filter added to darken the sky, added vibrance and saturation for blue and red tones and contrast mask in the dark zones at 30% to add contrast to the foreground.

Ratrod

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:00:00 +0200

While on vacation I found this rusted out RATROD 1949 Ford Pickup at a small car show in the town we stopped in for dinner. When I saw this I immediately thought of a nice moody image. For the post work:

Mod layer for adjustments
2 channel mixes (1 with blue filter for all but the RatRod and 1 with more of custom towards green for the ratrod)
5 contrast curves
1 vingette
1 toning curve
1 sharpening layer for the RatRod

Virginia Barn

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:00:00 +0200

I was driving through Virginia, U.S.A., and happened to glance to my left, at which point this cloud formation over the old barn on the hill literally stopped me in my tracks and had me scrambling for my camera and tripod. Ideally, I would have liked to use a graduated ND filter to balance the exposure of the sky against the land at the time of image capture, but I was conscious of the need to set up quickly before the cloud formation dissipated. My haste was justified, as I only had time to grab one frame before the clouds broke up and disappeared. For me, this image was all about the beautiful graphic simplicity of the compositional elements of the three clouds over the barn together with the hill and the rock in the foreground. The position and shape of the clouds was so perfect, I remember thinking at the time that if a painter was creating this scene, he might well elect to paint the clouds exactly where they were at that moment. I felt that rendering the image in colour would add nothing to what I was trying to communicate, so elected to convert the image to black and white, which - in addition to focussing attention on the shapes in the image rather than their colour - also allowed me to quickly and easily darken the sky and lighten the foreground by biasing the b&w conversion, helping to balance the exposure across the frame. I also removed the partially visible cloud at the top of the frame in post which I felt added nothing to the composition and simply pulled the eye upwards and out of the frame. In addition to cloning out the unwanted cloud and converting to black and white, I rotated the image very slightly to ensure that the walls of the barn were vertical. I also used three masked curves to adjust the tones of the sky, barn and foreground respectively prior to the b&w conversion, and used the Topaz Adjust plug-in to bring out the detail of the wood in the barn, as well as 'dodging' the grass in the centre of the frame in order to lighten the tones there and lead the eye into the frame towards the barn. Finally, I added a slightly warm tint to the monochrome image.