Distressed

I’ve been experimenting recently with post processing images in different ways, and have found it interesting to take a single image, straight from the camera, and push it in different directions using different techniques.  One of these, stemming from the ability to overlay different variants of the same image, is to drastically alter the contrast, tonal range, and definition of shadow, highlight and mid-tone areas to bring out detail in a photograph that even the human eye struggles to see in reality.

Today’s image is a good example.  This is a photograph of the wall of a house which you pass as you take the pedestrian route from Kinsale to Charlesfort.  I use the term “photograph” here loosely, because you could argue that the image has been so heavily processed that to call it such is misleading.

My first cut at processing this shot, in the days after I took it while on my way to take some more conventional photographs of Charlesfort, is on the right.  You may agree that is a pretty bland image of a wall that probably does not deserve to survive an initial cull of photographs from the trip when editing them.

However, before I ever delete a photograph – and actually, I should point out that I rarely if ever delete a photograph, but simply filter them out of view using Aperture’s rating system – I tend to think to myself as to what my motivation was in taking the shot in the first place.  And when I revisited this particular image last night, I recalled that what had caught my eye was the distressed cracking of the paint on the wall.  My initial processing of the photo does no justice to that, and makes no real attempt to bring out that detail of the subject in the final photograph.

So I revisted it last night, armed with a new arsenal of post-processing techniques.  The first step was to merge the exposure with a heavily underexposed version of itself, as this underexposed version would show up more of the cracks.  I tried different levels of merging, where the underexposed version would play a bigger or smaller role in the final merge, and when I was happy that I had something I could use, set about globally transforming my new image using the various tools available to me in Aperture – the contrast was increased as much as I could, I shifted the levels of the midtones drastically, I desaturated a little (as the increase in contrast had boosted saturation), and I straightened the image ever so slightly.

The result may not be true to what the wall looked like when it photographed it, but it is true to what caught my eye and prompted me to take the photograph.  And it’s particularly encouraging to find that I’m able use post processing techniques to rescue an image from the “Rejected” bin, and turn it into a shot that I’m willing to publish here.