I’m falling behind for no reason but being tired. It’s Thursday morning and this is the image for Tuesday. I made it while my friend Christian and I returned from dinner, and before we heard music until 2am. After that I was not exactly in the mood for image processing. Yesterday I came home late, processed it, chose a title, and then decided to lay down for only a short nap. And here we are: two days behind

Esther Emma and Flo asked me how I did the post-processing in “1158 – Sophisticated Lady“. Well, here we go:

It’s two versions from RAW, a dark one for the background, a lighter one for the foreground, and then in Photoshop I used some plugins: Noise Ninja, Topaz Detail and Topaz Clean. I used Noise Ninja on both versions, and by painting on the mask I used the light version for the face. With Topaz Detail I added some local contrast to the face, giving it more definition, but of course that raised noise again. I countered that with a skin beautifier effect in Topaz Clean, added some neutral blur (described towards the end of “571 – Them There Eyes II“). Somewhere in the mix there is also a push in saturation, done with my usual combo of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes, described in “683 – Welcome To The Republic“. Throw in a light vignetting layer and you’re done.

You see, there is not so much variation in my processing technique these days, and the reasoning is simple: When I change light in part of the image, I must change local contrast as well, otherwise it would look unnatural. When I do these things, I have to counter noise. Using the skin beautifier from Topaz Clean is a bit radical, but for a mannequin it is OK. On real people you have to be very careful with it, at least when you want to keep them recognizable. Topaz Clean tends to make them years younger, and that’s not always what you want, or better, that’s what you don’t want most of the time. But again, on this mannequin it was a very effective way to eliminate noise, the blur mostly adding glamor. As Flo recognized, the lights of the shop’s decoration in the background look like a pearl necklace, and that adds to the glamor as well.

That’s it. As for this post’s image, well, that’s a face stenciled upon a shop window, and behind the window is an add for a clearing out service. You see parts of the words “Entrümpelung”, “Dachböden” and some more, plus some phone numbers. I saw it while Christian and I walked to my place. I had some other images, but this natural overlay of graffiti and text struck me as an interesting detail. I love it how you can focus near with the Tamron 17-50/2.8.

The Song of the Day is “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind” from the 1967 Doors album “Strange Days”. We didn’t have The Doors in quite some time. That’s bad, but it can be remedied

YouTube has the song.