Photo Editing February’s photos

This week’s editing challenge over at Sonel’s blog is our choice – the only parameter is that it be shot in February.  Last month I went up to Ottawa’s Winterlude so I had a number of shots to choose from.  Below is the result of one of my efforts, and below that is the original.

In Sagelight I cropped it and then blew out the details in the foreground and middle ground using the light blender in the power box controls.  In Paint I removed the last of the foreground shadows and the girl in pink and the centre tree plus the arch to the left of the tree, which I found distracting.  Back in Sagelight I converted it to black and white, adjusted the lighting to bring up the interest in the sky and applied the vignette.  What I like about Sagelight’s vignette feature is that you can easily adjust its shape, angle and placement, and colour if you wish. In that way I concentrated the light on the city across the river.   Whether or not you like the results, the combination of effects provides quite a transformation.

These following shots also taken at Winterlude have been posted on my photo blog but here I will show the originals as well.   This is an ice sculpture – I couldn’t get close because the line was long and time was short so I had to make do with this shot.

But with Sagelight I brought the background to black using the light blender controls and cropped the shot.  An HDR effect brought up the details.  Sagelight has a number of HDR effects, some very subtle.

This shot was taken from a bus window –

After cropping and using an artistic HDR effect I liked the result and felt that the tilted buildings, window reflection and cropped truck in the foreground all created a bustling big city feel to the photo.  I adjusted the colour and left it.

This last one required a bit more editing …

I didn’t want the truck, or the woman in the white jacket.  I could have cropped the truck out but felt that destroyed the proportions of the photo.  In the end I cropped half of it and used Paint for the rest of it and the woman in the jacket. This required some rebuilding of the fence and a bit of the glass in the building, also done in Paint.  In Sagelight I applied an HDR effect and adjusted the lighting and colour.