Monday, November 28, 2005

Cornfield in Cambridgeshire


This is an image from a cornfield near where I work. From normal height, it's nothing special. But, taken low down, and using a filter to accentuate the sky, I was pleased to get this more dramatic take on an everyday scene. The sky was pretty stormy anyway, but I boosted it a little using Photoshop CS levels, and warmed up the corn husks a bit too. Then, I increased contrast and sharpened the whole thing, making the foreground sharper than the distance. I did this to get as much detail out of the interesting decaying corn as possible. I had two layers of the same image, sharpened the lower one a lot, then, using a mask in Photoshop, lightly brushed away the top, less-sharp layer to reveal the sharper elements below.

Ivan

2 comments:

Critical Light said...

Hi there,

One comment. Could you have used a gradient on the mask for the sharpness to achieve the same effect?

Anonymous said...

Hi Damian

You could, but I wanted to reveal the irregular shapes of the corn husks in the foreground, and I thought that a linear gradient would have been a bit artificial. That said, you could do as you suggest to mask off the sky etc in one go, and then use a brush to mask the remaining shapes. Good suggestion. In fact, thinking about it, you could mask the whole thing with a paint-bucket fill on the mask, and then get the white (reveal) brush, and paint through to the sharp below. As ever, there are loads of ways to do these things...
Cheers
Ivan