Image editing with photographer Simon Plant

In November 2007 I found myself in Paris for a meeting regarding a shoot I was being considered for. With that out of the way I decided to stay a few extra days to shoot some personal images and here is one of them. "It's all about the light" is something you will hear said a lot and the reason you hear it is because it's so true. No light, no photography simple as that and having great light is what it's all about.

In this instance I had forgot to adjust my alarm to Paris time and ended-up going out much earlier than I needed so had a long wait for the light. But this gave me some fantastic close up shots of the Eiffel towers structure complete with the stars. This image was shot about an hour before sunrise which gave me enough light in the sky for a good balance with the street lights. Night-time images really need to be shot at dawn or dusk while there is enough light left in the sky - black skies rarely work well. I wanted to shoot at about 50mm so not to get too much distortion and to be looking up at it. So I walked about 10 minutes and positioned the camera near some interesting mounds of leaves (hence the name). Exposure was about 3 and half seconds at F16 and of course the camera was mounted on a tripod. This gave me a good Raw file to which I could bring out the image I had pre visualised.

The Raw file is pretty flat but that's ok as we have what we need to work with.

The first step is to clean-up any dust and fag ends that seek to destroy the ambience I'm creating. Next we add a levels adjustment to get the exposure balanced out.

Original RAW file.	After levels adjustment.

Next is a selective curves adjustment to darken the image. I filled this adjustment with black to hide it and then painted it with white where I want to selectively add the darkening.

Selectively painting in the darkening curve.	Selectively painting in the darkening curve.

Next we lighten the image and selectively paint it in.

Painting in highlights.	The Highlight Curve.

Then I wanted to adjust the colours starting with everything except the sky. I painted in the adjustment again with a soft brush avoiding the sky.

Painting in colour adjustment for entire image except the sky.	Colour adjust for all but the sky.

Next I saved my selection from my ground colour adjustment and inverted this to mask everything except the sky (in white). I then used this to add a colour adjustment to just the sky to add more blue.

Mask for the sky colour adjustment.	Photograph after the adjustment.

I added a hue saturation adjustment to the sky to saturate it a little more and another for the green grass to the left.

Sky hue saturation adjustment.	Hue saturation adjustment for the grass.

I then added some more colour to the lamps by making a new empty layer set to colour mode and painted in some warm/yellow colour over all the lamps. I did this to add more colour and saturation in these areas.

Finally I added a curve to darken the edges of the image to help keep the viewers eyes where I wanted them.

Painting in colour over the lamps.	Darkening edges with a selective edge curve.

That's it I think this shows that you don't always need precise masking and that soft brushes can be used in some cases to good effect. You can view more of my work by visiting Pro Photo Insights.