If you’ve been following my photolog, you know that I just posted two versions of the same photo (click for a larger version):

Quincy smelter (original edit)

Quincy smelter (new version)

A few years ago my friend Paul got married, and the day before the wedding he and Emily chartered a cruise of the Portage on the Keeweenaw Star. As we were leaving Houghton the ship was maneuvering around in the middle of the Portage, and everyone was looking at… I don’t remember what, but I turned around and saw the Quincy smelter lit up with a big shaft of light… and then the light was gone. I still put a new lens on the camera and waited for the light to shift, and I got this picture.

The first version of the photo I edited in a demo version of photoshop, and I was explicitly trying for a dramatic black and white Noah Grey look (like this), mainly because I couldn’t get the color version to work. I printed out a copy and sent it to Noah and he liked it. I always wanted to print this thing huge and stick it above my couch or something. I have a whole mess of photos that I’ve never shown anyone because I think they would look great printed out and framed, and that’s kind of how I expect I’ll show them to people.

I’m gradually changing my mind about these “print-only” photos. Anyway, back to this one: I was looking through my photos from the wedding and I found this one and thought I’d take another go at editing it.

The black and white shot I re-edited in lightroom, using the original PSD as a guide, and I think it stinks. Nothing I do helps. I probably used a lot of masks and foofiness when editing the original. So I opened the PSD in Lightroom and made some global tweaks, and that is the black and white version I posted.

I figured I’d give a color version a go now that I have some color editing experience in Lightroom. I really liked it when I finished it but now I’m not so sure. (And if you are detecting some similarities to Noah’s later Dublin work, then you get a prize. See also this.) I keep flipping back and forth on whether or not I like the color edit. If you are detail-oriented you can see some details in the color version that I had cloned out of the black and white version because I found them distracting.

I will say that my two favorite things about the original black and white edit are how the chain link fence is barely visible in front of the ground-floor door in the middle lower left, and the texture of the shaded side of the smelter. These are not details that are easy to see on the computer screen. I dislike how monotone the face of the building is. In the color version I like the interplay between the greens and the reds, but I am not very happy with how the water turned out, and I’m not sure how I would fix it, even if I had the option of making local corrections.

I also have come to the conclusion that the Canon 75-300 4-5.6 IS/USM lens is a pile of poo; it’s quite inconsistent, and most of the issues I have with editing this photo are due to its color and detail rendition.

Comments are open, so let me know what you think. Here is a resized version of the unedited file if you want to take a look at it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under general foofiness, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.