Cretan Images - Chania Lighthouse

[David]

Chania is a bustling town on the north coast of Western Crete. The harbour area is particularly photogenic. Here are a couple of shots of the famous lighthouse. Unfortunately, everyone wants to see it and clamber about on it. Consequently, tourist infect the images.





The shots were taken with my Canon 40D fitted with a Canon 24-105 mm L series zoom. Post-processing followed a normal workflow, but with special attention to perspective correction and sharpening.

Comments and criticisms please.

Cheers

David

[wjh31]

i like the composition of the second better, and the first looks like you might have blown some of the details on the lighthouse, maybe try darkening it a bit to try and bring them back.

[Davey]

I prefer the second for a few reasons. It has no distractions in background, colour is uniform and proportionally spot on and looks balanced (to my eye at least). The first looks like it's not quite blown so no doubt you could save the detail, although I've not checked the histogram so could be wrong.

I personally find the dark tree in the background pulls my eyes a lot so perhaps lens blur and mild desaturate and drag brightness up so it doesn't look as dark and contrasting. Also I think the wall in the first unbalances it, might not work but I wonder if breaking the outline up more by enhancing detail in the wall might work. Eg. Strong curves, burn brush and wide radius USM. Down side is it could shift too much focus from the lighthouse although you could do a little to that perhaps, someone like colin or dave prob have better idea on that.

Lastly as for tourists perhaps take a 2 nd shot (identical setting) a few seconds apart (or bit more for slow people) and then stack first shot on top and layermask out the tourists. Since you only need a small amount of second image any realignment should be easy and should look flawless and save time with the clone brush. Other ways to do same thing like change the blend mode etc etc but whatever you are familar with.

[wjh31]

@davey

regarding stacking images to remove moving objects, i.e tourists, there is software that can automatically align and remove such objects, i believe autopano pro and photo acute are two examples, both have decent trials. Or even photoshop i believe has a function to align layers, meaning youd just need to brush in some transparency and merge the layers.

[David]

Hi Guys - Thanks for the comments. The first image is not burnt out in the highlights according to the histogram, but I guess some parts look very light. The point by Davey about the tree is well made, although I had not seen it in that way. I'm also going to check what I could do with the wall. As for taking another exposure to remove the tourists, I would need to have had a tripod with me.

Thanks again.

Cheers

David

[wjh31]

Since the tourists arnt covering too large an area of the photograph, and since they are reasonably far from the camera, you probably wouldnt need to use a tripod, just handheld wouldnt cause too excessive a perspective shift between two images. 15-30 seconds would probably be long enough for the tourists to move to a different area of the image, and you should be able to keep it still enough for that.

Alternatively, get clone happy.

[David]

Hi wjh31 - You're probably correct in that I could snap without a tripod and I shall be bearing these comments in mind. Thanks again.

David

[Davey]

Another point I forgot to mention is I really like the shadows in pic 2. The sun is at a nice angle so you get enough visible shadow on the building without too much being in shade or too little and due to side and above angle you don't get plain looking shadow but interesting shape that picks out detail and architectural features.