What’s Your Play is hosted by Laura at Dolce Pics. She provides a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot and the folks post-process it and share the results. More info here.
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Here’s my entry for What’s Your Play #40 -Water Wheel
Software: Lightroom 2
What I did and why:
I didn’t do too much editing on this aside from enhancing the colors.
* Deepened the shadows and brightened the high lights by tweaking the curves just slightly
* I loved the sky peeking through the trees so I boosted the blue just a bit
* I thought the ground was a little too yellow so I toned down the yellow to more of a brownish tone to enhance to earth
* Sharpened the image to bring out the detail in the rocks and trees
* Vignette to finish off
I didn’t crop this photo. The obvious crop would be to focus on the wheel. I thought about it but decided that I’d lose more than I would gain, especially because I loved the litle bit of sky but didn’t want to sacrifice the ground to do so. I like the scene as a whole very much, especially the frozen pond. So I figured that I’d enhance the feeling of the cold, crisp scene of a water wheel in winter than just a water wheel alone.
This looks very crisp and cool, which is very fitting with the frozen pond on the background and “hibernating” wheel. I like the hit of blue in the sky so it’s great you didn’t crop that.
Thanks for the step-by-step and reasoning behind what you did. Awesome!