DRP Before / After I took this shot at the steel factory in Abu Dhabi. It was part of my commissioned industrial/corporate shoot. One of my favourite subjects was this alien looking, state-of-the-art iron ore processing plant. This frame was captured in the early morning hours, minutes after the sunrise. While rushing to capture the scene before the sun got too high, I made a slight error with framing and ended up cutting off the top two exhaust pipes. Unfortunately, I only realized the mistake when I got back in the studio. Urgency and art dont mix well. I really liked the weirdness and complexity of this crazy looking plant which made this photograph so special. I thought it had the potential of being a great image but the trimmed top really bugged me. I was determined to save the shot, no matter what. I started by extending the image on top and recreating the missing blue sky. Then I re-built the chopped-off exhaust pipes by sampling the neighbouring ones. Basically, a post-processing task turned into a full-on digital paint job which took about an hour until I was happy with the result. Once the missing top of the image was re-created, it was time to do something extra on this image. I converted it into BW image with Silver Efex Pro plugin and gave it a slight Selenium tint. BW conversion made the blue sky very dark, nearly black, and that made the exhaust pipes on top of the image to blend with the background. To rectify this, I decided to create a streak of bright, motion-blurred clouds and placed them just where I thought they were needed to separate the metal structure from the background. Last step involved bringing out some extra details from the steel tubes with Viveza 2 and final grading with Color Efex Pro. I also added two workers to help appreciate the scale of this installation.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 20:32:47 +0000
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