So, it’s been a while… I’ve been shooting quite a lot of late, but mostly for a couple of personal projects and as these are a work in progress, I don’t want to publish them half finished. It does mean however, that I’ve got an almighty backlog of post processing to plough through and it feels a bit like an insurmountable mountain at the moment. So I figured I’d get back into Photoshop last night and have a dabble with some new ideas on some images I shot in Manchester recently that don’t belong to either project. The above image was taken looking down Cross Street in Manchester towards Albert Square, looking directly into the sun and using my D300 & the 18-200mm Sigma 30mm with an ISO of 200, a shutter speed of 1/8000 sec and an aperture of F1.4. I was using Aperture Priority at the time and an exposure compensation of -0.7. On it’s own, it’s not a great image. It’s certainly no HCB!! But I wanted to try adding some texture to it in Photoshop.
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I’d previously shot this image of paint peeling on a door in Chinatown a couple of days before hand and thought that the patterns on it would be ideal for my texture. I simply exported both images as they were shot from Lightroom into Photoshop put them on separate layers, and changed the blending to Overlay. Reducing the opacity a little (to about 60% I think), I then applied a Layer Mask and used a black brush with the opacity set to about 40% and brushed over the couple a little to reduce the texture effect on them. Once I was happy with this, I then opened Nik’s Silver Efex to give it some black and white toning. I could probably have done this in Photoshop itself, but Silver Efex is so good and easy to use, there’s no point slaving over something that you can do in a few clicks of a mouse eh? 
When I shoot film I like to use TMax 400 as I really love the high contrast results this film gives, and Silver Efex can near enough exactly mirror this effect with a click of a mouse! It really rocks! I then finished it off with a control point on the couple to just lift the brightness on them a little to try and bring them out a bit, and that was that. I’m going to try and do more of this – detailing how I’ve processed some images and I hope some of you find it helpful / interesting. As always, please feel free to add comments below.
On a side note, I’ve been browsing through PDN’s 30 photogs (sorry – Twitter speak) photographers, to watch in 2009 – http://bit.ly/VcwDU and there is some stunning work on there. I highly recommend you check it out. Of real interest to me so far are:-
Chiara Goia at chiaragoia.com, James Pomerantz at jamespomerantz.com and Jared Moosy who can be found at jaredmoossy.com.
That’s all for now – as always catch me on Twitter at twitter.com/fabfilippini or check out these stuff I save to Delicious at delicious.com/fabfilippini
Note: Thanks to @bertpalmer on Twitter for pointing out that I couldn’t possibly have shot this with an 18-200mm lens at F1.4 as I originally posted. If Nikon did make such a lens, you can be sure as hell that I wouldn’t be carrying around the streets of Manchester! It would probably weigh about 5 kilos and cost a squillion pounds!!
