photography

Creative Editing

Looking back on photos I made on the morning of September 16, 2019, I’ve selected this view exposed at a bend in the Rhein north of Boppard, Germany for today’s examination of my editing process.

Dramatic lighting and a dynamic scene showing a cruise ship and a southward intermodal freight provide the elements for an interesting photo, but without some creative editing the composition falls down.

What does that mean? While I captured the essence of rail and river transportation, without some adjustment the photo doesn’t work effectively. The train is too easily lost and the ship is swallowed in silhouette.

Using Adobe Lightroom, I made a whole series of adjustments to improve this image. By selectively adjusting exposure and contrast, I was able to make the prime elements of this image fit together better.

Although I cropped out some distracting parts of the photo in order to help direct the eye toward the distant train, and I adjusted exposure to make the sky seem more dramatic and to better separate the train from the background, I didn’t add anything to this photo that wasn’t captured at the time of exposure.

I’ve included the FujiFilm RAF RAW file (scaled without editing for presentation) and a few screenshots of the Lightroom work window to show positions of the slider controls and localize masks, and then my final interpretations.

RAF RAW file without cosmetic alteration.
Adobe Lightroom work window showing the effect of the ‘select sky’ mask. This uses an artifical intelegence algorithim to more accurately select the sky. This saves a lot of painstaking effort trying to mask the sky by hand. Once selected I reduced the overall sky exposure and reduced the highlight areas of the sky to make the most of the dramatic detail captured by the camera.
In this screenshot, I’ve created a radial gradient mask which feathers the extent of the effect around the subject (in this case the distant intermodal train). I then made several adjustments specific to this area. The most significant was lightening the brightest highlights (called ‘white’ in the work window control panel) which helps make the train more prominent in the composition.
This is my final version.

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