BRASHLEY PHOTOGRAPHY

The objective of Wordless Wednesday is to post a photo and let the photo speak for itself. Well, the manipulation of this image started out as a trial to see how far you can push the Photo Merge in Lightroom.

And I have to say in this case it was great. I started out with these two images.

I like both images, however what I didn’t like is this:

• The left-hand image had the tree branches but no tree.
• The right-hand image had the tree itself but not the end of the building.

So, both of these photos were never going to processed and displayed on the our website.

However, I keep going back to them and thinking what could I do to make them useable?

Then list light bulb moment struck me.

I wonder if Lightroom could create some sort of panorama shot, so I could use the best bits of each image?

I can only but trial.

I selected both images, right-clicked and selected Photo Merge and then Panorama. I checked the box to fill in the edges. And sat patiently for the fail to come up. I was shocked when it didn’t as these photographs were not part of a panoramic shot. And below is what Lightroom did.

I was amazed… but it still had its faults, for instance:

• The Sky was Bland
• The image was crooked
• A bit of the tree didn’t look right.

Lightroom Stage 1

• Sent the image to ON1 Photo RAW 2023 for a sky replacement.

ON1 Photo RAW 2023

• I knew I wanted a moody looking photo so I selected a stormy sky. Then I ticked the reflection box. Once happy with the sky and its position I saved the image which sent it back into Lightroom

Lightroom Stage 1

• Added a Preset I use quite a lot.
• In the Transform Panel I selected Auto and then played around with the horizontal, aspect and X-offset sliders.
• I then selected the building as an object and played around with the exposure, warmth, clarity, contast and sharpness sliders.
• Then then using the Healing brush I sorted out the bits of the tree I didn’t like.
• I darkened the grass slightly using a radial filter.
• Added a vignette of -11.

Wordless Wednesday

Revamp of Image

I then decided to take one step further and make it brighter. To do this, I used a preset I have with numerous radial filters to increase light in places. And playing around with the settings of a couple of the masks and deleting some masks from this preset. And finally I got this lighter version of the image.