One More Elevator to the Mix

[KMA Dakota]

Very cold and rainy day yesterday (09-08-07). Dacoda Image picked us up and we headed out. I explained that I wanted a shot of an elevator to add to our growing collection at Photocamel. I was raining pretty hard at the time we found this unit in a small town. The crops were so good this year out in the badlands area that the elevators could not hold all the grain before it could be shipped. That is the pile you see on the ground in front of the elevator.

It was pretty dark and the buildings were wet. Hope you can still see some details.

Dakota

[KMA Dakota]

Monitor, please delete this thread. I cannot find a way to do it from my end. Thank you for your assistance.
Dakota

[Deiussum]

Hi Ken, don't get too discouraged.

I kind of like this. It definitely conveys the feeling of a cold and rainy day. Seems like a more photogenic elevator than many of the corrugated metal ones. I find myself wondering how this would work if the clouds were burned in a bit more to appear more ominous.

[KMA Dakota]

Dan,

Thanks for the encouragement. I wasn't looking for that here when I asked it to be deleted. I just didn't believe it should be hanging around.

Dan you know you are welcome to have fun with any of my posts! . I love seeing what others see in them and when they make them better, well I can still claim some credit, heck, I took the picture !

Dakota

[Deiussum]

Ok. I've never really tried to edit someone else's pictures before, but I really wanted to mess with this a bit so I decided to give it a whirl.

I didn't spend as much time with it as I could have, but figured it's good enough to give you an idea of what I was thinking.

First, I cropped the partial tree peeking in on the right side of the frame. It seemed to be a bit of a distraction.

Next, I duplicated the layer so that I could mess with some ideas without affecting the base layer. It makes it easy to compare edits by toggling the visibilty of different layers to compare results.

What I ended up doing, was to create a "Burn" layer. Basically I started out with a layer that was all white on top of my duplicated layer. I set the mode of that layer to "Burn."

Next I took a large soft brush, reduced it's opacity to 20% and started to paint black (well, gray because of the reduced opacity) strokes around the outline of the sky. Once I got the outline drawn out, I switched the burn layer's mode back to normal so I could see better where I was drawing and I used that same soft brush to fill the sky with that same color. I probably could have used a bucket fill, but I decided to just do the strokes to get a bit of irregularity.

It ended up with lots of irregularities along stroke edges where I had stroked over a few places multiple times. I smoothed that out by switching to the smudge tool and smudging all around so that it was smoothed out some, but not perfectly the same shade. Once I had it how I wanted, I switched the layer back to burn mode to view the results. I switched to a smaller brush and repeated the steps I did before in a few areas I tried to darken a bit more.

Once I was mostly satisfied, I flattened the image and used curves with a slight S curve that made the shadows a bit darker, and the highlights a bit brighter to try and add a bit of contrast. I then sharpened a bit with a radius of about 0.2, amount of .9 (90% in PS) and a threshold of 9.

I'm not sure it's really any better, but I gave it a shot. The sharpening seems to have brought out some of the JPEG compression artifacts a bit more, and there are a couple spots where the blown out sky is showing up a bit more.

[KMA Dakota]

Taking that tree out of there was a great idea and I can really see that extra punch you put in the sky. Really makes this a better shot!! That extra work you did with sharpening and contrast adds that nice suttlity to the colors and shadows.

I like what you did not I have to go and look into working with layering that you used and the special effects as well.

I have not played around in the PSP on layering at all yet. Just don'tknow how but maybe I can get laycey to help me.

I can't thank you enough for the time you took to work on this and I appreciate it a lot. This was a frustrating shot that I wanted then could not get the effect I wanted!!

Again, I am grateful!!

Dakota

[New England Moments]

Dakota this is nice... and to me a Color Black and White... in other words , so little color it makes you think B+W.... THAT WORKS!!

The re do is also very nice , and agree on the tree being gone, this keeps it mysterious looking and desolate feeling...

I think you did well on this one showing , for me anyway , a old look to modern times.. with that said, Ya may want Dr. clone to remove the car also... but it does have a Great Nostalgic appeal, and I like that a lot ... GREAT JOB on this!!

Now the extra Grain, WET , what happens to it ?

[KMA Dakota]

Originally Posted by New England Moments

Dakota this is nice... and to me a Color Black and White... in other words , so little color it makes you think B+W.... THAT WORKS!!

The re do is also very nice , and agree on the tree being gone, this keeps it mysterious looking and desolate feeling...

I think you did well on this one showing , for me anyway , a old look to modern times.. with that said, Ya may want Dr. clone to remove the car also... but it does have a Great Nostalgic appeal, and I like that a lot ... GREAT JOB on this!!

Now the extra Grain, WET , what happens to it ?

Tom (Master NEM)

Thank you for stopping and looking at this shot! The elevator itself remined me of all the small towns that are now dying all across our country. The weather and conditions that day gave me such a meloncoly (sp) feeling and I wanted that!! BADLY in that shot!

Thank you for your C & C here, again the camel family brought me out of some duldrums!!

Now, as to that grain on the ground. I have seen that in the past and usually, they only do that with grain that will be moved fairly quickly, is not as valuable say as Durum Wheat that can't have gotten wet! (Color changes from a Translucent Flint color to a cream color - doen't hurt the food value, just the look and cuts the price by more than a third!!!! ) When they get ready to move the grain, they will put it through some very big dryers. Yes, dryers!!!

When I was growing up, only some very, very large farms and elevator complexes had grain dryers. Now it seems it is a standard piece of equipment for farmers. Not cheap either!!!!!!! !!

Once the grain is dryed, it can be stored again or shipped. Wet grain can start to ferment, get very hot and start to burn. Very dangerious for grain elevators!!!!!!!!!!! That is why every load of grain brought to an elevator is tested for mositure content. THere is no wink of an eye on this test, believe me!!!!!!

Hope that long winded explanation is OK. I tend to run off at the mouth.

Dakota

[New England Moments]

Interesting on that grain and dryers... never knew this... I do know up here anyway , when it comes to haying , it doesn't hurt , to get wet .. ( Not that you want it to ) but can NOT get Wet for Horse Hay... so haying a tricky 3 day affair with mother nature when it come to hay in these parts.. Probably where the saying comes from, "" Make Hay , While the Gettin is Good "" or "" Make Hay While the sun shines ""

soo in other words Cows and other critters can eat hay that has been wet , but HORSE HAY must be Dry!!

[KMA Dakota]

Only a guess on this one Tom but Cows have 4 stomaches and they re-chew (their cud) from their frist stomach into finer compostion. Wet grasses, etc don't seem to bother them except in the early spring when they seem to develop a lot of gas (don't get caught behind one ) A cow can get a lot more out of its feed because of the way it can digest it!

I beleive a horse only has the one gut and is suseptible to gas LOCK Up!! Not fun to try to cure!!!!! Can kill them if not treated quickly! I know there is more to this but my friend, I just do't remember!! At 61 I have a hard time remembering where we are!!

Dakota

[Goofup]

Dakota, one of the things I like about PSP is it's simplicity, as well as being able to do all that "fancy stuff". First I did 3 things:
1- took out the tree on the right. (crop)
2- cloned out the car. (clone tool)
3- straigtened it using the left front edge of the building. (straighten tool. I did lose a bit of the right side when I did that.)

Next:
1- Smart Photo Fix. Left all those handy-dandy sliders as the default except for brightness- made that +2. (It usally overbrightens- always bring it back to 0 first thing).
2- Clarfy at 3.0.



That's it! That's all I did. I always try those two simple things first to every picture. If I don't like it, two clicks of the Undo button undoes it.
(But you really need to learn layers...)

[KMA Dakota]

Goofup,

I can certainly see the difference! How did you get that picture to change back and forth between the modifications. That is Sweet!!

I have PSP9 here and will have to look into the layering! I can see it is going to a big boon to my submissions if I can get experience in its use! I guess I can look at it like learning the technical Operations of a New BMW Motorcycle or Car. Hell if I can do that and I did teach those things for BMW for 19 of my 25 years there, I should be able to work with layering and the other options.

Thanks for taking the time to help this old sod! It is appreciated, A LOT

Dakota

[Goofup]

Thanks. It's a simple animated GIF that switches back and forth between 2 layers (one before, one after). I'd really look at getting the trial of PSPX2 (just out). The Learning Center would be great for you, and it includes 2 hours of training videos.

[KMA Dakota]

Originally Posted by Goofup

Thanks. It's a simple animated GIF that switches back and forth between 2 layers (one before, one after). I'd really look at getting the trial of PSPX2 (just out). The Learning Center would be great for you, and it includes 2 hours of training videos.

Goofup,

Thanks a million!! Laycey was tring to give me some lessons today. We found out something very interesting, I down loaded laycey's last pictures from her camera to my Computer and then we compaired those to what she sees on her PC (Dell XPS 400) I have an HP Pavilion dv8000 Notebook with the Expansion Base.

There was a very noticable difference between the two systems. On my system, they were darker and a little clearer. Difiantely lighter on hers. We looked at all the preferences and they were the same. (?)

Going into the monitor setings now and see if we can get them set correctly.

Thanks also for the information on the PSP program. Right now we have to watch our sheckles very closely. We are living on only my retirement pay and just shredded a tire on the RV. Have to get a new one and maybe more!! So will have to see how the finances go before any more photo related purchaces.

Life is life! Right!! We do what we can do!!

Thanks again, your help means a lot to us!!!

Dakota

[KMA Dakota]

Originally Posted by Goofup

Thanks. It's a simple animated GIF that switches back and forth between 2 layers (one before, one after). I'd really look at getting the trial of PSPX2 (just out). The Learning Center would be great for you, and it includes 2 hours of training videos.

Goofup,

Boy am I getting old and with even worse memory. Trail Version!!! DA!!!!!! No cost Da!!!

I think I will take my medicine now and go hang in the closet!!

Dakota

[New England Moments]

goofup, I've said it before , and say it again.... ----> You are the PhotoShop Master...

NICE NICE!

[Goofup]

Well, I just thought I'd mention the Smart Photo Fix to Dakota because it's so easy for a beginner to work with. Yes, it will "suggest" settings, but there's easy sliders so you can further adjust brightness, saturation, sharpness, shadows, highlights, and color balance if you want... and they're all in one dialog box. PSE 5.0 also has their Quick Fix mode which does almost the same thing. This is a handy way to make those global changes to photos before messing with individual pixels. Course the Clarfy in PSP is unique and great for adding pop. The "clarfy" in Lightroom doesn't even come close.

So you've discovered that one picture looks completely different on 2 computers side-by-side? Welcome to the world of Color Management! I'll let the real experts talk to you about Color Management, but it sounds like you need to get the colors and settings right on both computers. Course the best way is to use hardware (Huey, Spider Pro, etc.), but doing it "by eye" will probably be good enough for now. If you have Elements, you might try Adobe Gamma, OR, PSP also has a monitor calibration of it's own (File/Color Management/Monitor Calibration), OR here's a link to a free color profiler. I haven't used it, but it looks pretty good, and I'm sure there's several others out there so some time with Google wouldn't hurt, ok?

Hex2Bit - Software by Mike Walters

Basically what any of these do is make a little file that loads at startup and tells the computer what white, black, green, blue, red, contrast settings, etc, really are. I would do your desktop first, then the laptop, then (therotically) they should match. After you run it you might notice that all your pictures now look a bit "off". That's ok, it means that they were off in the first place. It won't be perfect, but it will be better than nothing!