The Eye

[Tony M]

I'm always pleasantly surprised at how a fairly mundane photo can be taken straight off the camera, and the colours brought out in a variety of ways. I played with differently toned backgrounds but preferred the less saturated one here.



Tony

[ggt]

ooooohhhhhh, ahhhhhhhh! Seriously!

How did you get the water like that?

[Tony M]

Wellllllllll, it's a bit hard to say. I kind of meandered through various steps in Lightroom 4 and came up with this. The main ones that affected the water were to use the Highlight Saturation (HSL), clicking on the water and increasing its saturation. I then used the Split Toner and shifted the hue toward a golden hue; that made the water quite yellow/green. I think that step was important. I then reduced the saturation of the yellow in the HSL tool (by clicking on the water and dragging downwards), so that the whole image was very unsaturated - almost monochrome. I then recovered the saturation of the duck's colours using the HSL tool - mainly by increasing the purple and orange saturation. Increasing the orange saturation brought out orange in the water that I didn't know existed in the image; this is probably the wow factor of the water. Then greatly increasing the contrast produced the final punch.

Below is the original image straight off the camera. I almost deleted it, then decided to play with it a bit instead. You're welcome to use and abuse it.



Tony

[GrahamH]

I too, found the water the main point of interest, shift the duck out of the way and leave the background .
Graham

[ggt]

Tony, even in the original image, I think the water is something I like very much. Somehow it is different.

[Tony M]

I too, found the water the main point of interest, shift the duck out of the way and leave the background .

Not as silly as it sounds. Next time I'm around water, I'll throw something into it and capture the ripples and reflections. That'll give me some raw material to play with.

Tony

[Tony M]

Tony, even in the original image, I think the water is something I like very much. Somehow it is different.

Yes it does have a rather diffuse look to it. There appears to be some movement in the water, which I didn't expect with a shutter speed of 1/125s. I don't have much of a feel for shutter speed and movement; I need to experiment a bit more...