Once the color and contrast were closer to what I wanted, it was time to enhance the mood of the scene via the Glamour Glow filter.
The added contrast from the settings I chose was making the shadow areas darker than I wanted, so a little nudge on the Shadows slider and the detail in those areas was back. Often a little tweak with the Shadows/Highlights sliders makes a big difference. These sliders are found in most Color Efex Pro filters and though they may be small, they work wonders when the selected filter blocks up shadows or blows out the highlights. You may notice two small sliders labeled Shadows/Highlights below the Prefilter sliders.
By using prefilter 4 at 43%, I could boost the contrast and saturation without it looking garish and overdone. While it was tempting to go with over the top saturation, I wanted to keep it from looking overprocessed. The Prefilter menu is where you can really go crazy with the color as the different settings bring out different tonalities. Not wanting to make the photo look like it was shot during the day, I used setting three with an intensity of 59%. The four presets in the Light pulldown menu are meant to simulate different sunlight effects. The Light and Prefilter settings are where fun lies in this plug-in. So even if it’s supposed to make my photo look like it was shot on a sunny day, my intent in using it was to add more contrast between the foreground greenery, the lights in the town and the blue of the sky and the water. The Sunshine filter on night scene? Oh yes! One of the things I love most about many of these filters is that they provide great effects when not used for their original purpose. I have several favorite filters that I rely on, and one of them is Sunshine. I used a separate plug-in to reduce the noise in the sky and opened up Color Efex Pro. Of the many different compositions and exposures I made, this was my favorite.Īfter some initial processing in Lightroom, I exported the file and opened it in Photoshop. As the sky got darker, the lights from the town became brighter and I kept shooting until I had what I felt was a good balance between the two. Sure enough, when I returned just before sunset, I was the only person at the overlook. Twilight is one of my favorite times to shoot, and this photograph does a better job of explaining why than any words I could write. Since most people are photographing during daylight, one of the easiest things to do is shoot after the sun goes down or before it rises. So the first question I ask myself when I’m in these types of settings, is how can I photograph it in a way that hasn’t been seen a million times before?
Like all subjects that have become photographic clichés, it’s one of those locations that practically photographs itself. Every year, thousands of travelers walk past the overlook where I set up my tripod for this image, and you can find hundreds, if not thousands of photographs online that were shot from this very spot. This image from Vernazza in Italy’s Cinque Terre National Park was a result of my desire to do a different take on an iconic location. There are many reasons to go for a more artistic rendering of an image. Color Efex Pro has several filters that provide a number of useful artistic effects that can be applied to almost any type of photograph. There are other times when more radical edits are required, or maybe a more artistic, rather than realistic interpretation of the scene is desired. In many cases, subtle edits are all that are needed to bring a photo closer to your vision of the final result. In my last post, I used Nik Color Efex Pro to make subtle changes that help draw the viewer’s eye to the main subject of the images.
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