I took the featured picture a number of years in the past. That spring, I spent a weekend in San Francisco whereas getting ready to fly again to Montreal after a two-week driving journey by California.
I took the featured picture from Treasure Island, positioned in the course of San Francisco Bay. Each time I go to the Bay Space, I be sure that to search out the time—even whether it is just a few minutes—to absorb one in all my favourite metropolis views.
This time, I targeting the colours and architectural patterns of the town.
Photographing San Francisco from Treasure Island has its personal set of challenges. The island is roughly 2km away from the portal space of downtown. The gap makes it difficult to discover a focal point in each the foreground and midground. A lot of the images taken from the island have a boring foreground comprised of water and nothing else.
However I’ve a number of methods up my sleeve to unravel this drawback. For the reason that channel between the island and the town is a busy portal space, it solely takes a couple of minutes till one other cargo ship or barge passes by. It usually makes an attention-grabbing compositional ingredient.
In my case, I didn’t have to attend lengthy for a cargo ship. As an alternative, I noticed a paddler approaching my location and made certain to incorporate him as a part of the composition.
Plus, the colour distinction between the blue sky, the orange rock, and the inexperienced vegetation was completely breathtaking.
Taking pictures
I used to be taking pictures hand-held and I used the longest focal size (70mm) of my lens to zoom in on the town.
Modifying & Processing
It was a single RAW processing workflow.
Lightroom (80%)
My first aim was to enhance the composition by eradicating the empty sky on the high and the empty water of the bay on the backside. I used the Crop Overlay instrument to vary the facet ratio from the unique 3 x 3 to extra panoramic orientation with an facet ratio of two x 1.
Subsequent, I used the Pure preset from my Panorama Preset Assortment as the bottom for Lightroom Speedy Modifying. Then I used TOOLKIT to spice up the Distinction and the Readability.
The Lightroom Preset Modifying System: Pure (9, 17, 25, 33)
Photoshop (20%)
In Photoshop the principle aim was to spice up the distinction even additional. I utilized the distinction selectively by making the realm of water and sky, ensuring that solely architectural particulars had been affected.
The aggressive distinction resulted in extreme digital noise and I had to make use of a comparatively sturdy noise discount setting to eradicate it.
Plugins: DeNoise (noise discount), Topaz Element (native distinction increase).
Complete time: 20min