Please comment on my work

[jelhak]

Its no beauty retouching or restoration but still I would like comments on my work so I can learn from it. I have attached the before and after so you can see the 'real' scene and the way I translated in PS what my mind saw.

Thank you all for your time.

(Quality of the after pic is not that good because of have to bringing it back to under 100kb)

[Swampy]

Lovely light work. Subtile yet dramatic. Go to the front of the class.

[Peter S]

All I can do is echo what Swampy has written - First Rate.


Peter

[Helga]

I lvoe what you have achieved, would you please guide me with what you have exactly done to achieve this effect?
Thanks

[jelhak]

Ok.....my english is not that good so I give it a try. I guess there are probably much better ways to do this but this is how I did it:

Its not possible to explain every step otherwise this will be a very long post. I will give you the main steps.

First I put the perspective the way I want it with the 'free transform' and 'crop' tool. Then I used 'shadow/highlight' to give me all the information there is in the image.

The last step revealed a lot of noise so I had to do noise reduction before going on. For that I use the plugin 'Noise Ninja'. I didn't want to remove all the noise because it would be of help for the effect I had in mind.

Next I used 'curves' to get high contrast and in addition to that I added a '50% grey' overlay layer to paint in more dark and light where I wanted it.

To give the windows and the wall in opposit of them them a more dreamy light I used a 'gaussian blur' overlay layer. I masked this out and then painted in the light with a large soft brush.

To give the gold ornaments and red carpet a full color I used 'hue/saturation' layer again masked out and painted in just the gold ornaments and carpet with table.

Now for the sunrays. I found there are a lot of ways to do this but every time it just didn't give me the natural feeling. To obtain this I had to do too much different steps (blurred threshold or spotlights, clouds for smoky/dust appearance etc.). Every time the next step made me realise that the former one wasn't just right so I had to do it all over again. This made me look for a tool that would give me the possibillity to do it all at the same time so I could adjust every step again and again and it would not be destructive. I found all this in the plugin AUtoFX Mystical Lighting.

To give the image more strength and depth I sharpened all the ornaments and parts of the structures.

To finish it of I added a last '50% grey' overlay layer and painted darks and lights untill I was happy with the dramatic feel of the scene.

More can be seen at:
http://www.pbase.com/jimhakvoort/the..._side_of_light

[Swampy]

Thanks for the workflow info, Jelhak. Again, Excellent work.

[rdist]

This is my first post here. Great work! Truly amazing. Great write up too.

[zganie]

really great lighting

zganie