Post processing

I took this today on our walk to work. I saw the awesome texture of the wall and the framing element of the empty doorway, and asked Agust to stand there. He decided to put his hands up on the frame, which actually improved the pose a lot. The lighting is all from an overcast sky.

I wanted to really play up the texture of the wall, so I used a lot of contrast, clarity, and sharpening on the wall texture. Here you can see the before and after:



And a gif flashing between the changes to better show them:



The main things I did, was to immediately boost the fill light a little to show more of the interior of the alcove. Then I desaturated just his jacket, as it was too attention grabbing. Next I imported to Photoshop, and used the liquify tool to adjust the shape of his silhouette to be more dynamic. I then lifted up to a new layer, his torso and legs. Then I transformed the top and bottom separately to lengthen his legs, while shortening his torso. Finally I used a smart sharpen to add even more contrast to the walls, and then masked it away from his face and the interior of the alcove (the alcove was getting too noisy with the last sharpening, and faces shouldn't be oversharpened).

I had to start with a photo that I liked to begin with, but post-processing really opens up some doorways to hit the vision you had in your head when you lifted the camera to your eye.