Work In Progress

Perhaps you are tired of looking at this image, but the iterations it goes through as I work towards what I hope is a good print, is, I think; useful.

I was very clever - I shrunk the image for web publication, then came back later in the day and noted the image hadn't been saved, so of course did so, thus saving the small version on top of the big, and losing the full size version. This kind of error is essentially terminal as once saved, the original is gone. Fortunately of course I still had the three images which had been morphed by the stitching programme and could be put back together, and even better, I had decided part way through editing the image to save an unsharpened version so that I could upsize if if need be for making a really big print - say 3X4 feet.

I started with this unsharpened version. Of course, I had made hundreds of changes since saving the unsharpened version - all lost to my carelessness. Still, with a bit of work removing hundreds of rain drops from the image as well as reinventing the cropping, colour balance, contrast, burning and dodging, I have arrived at this version, which fortunately I prefer.

Colin of Auspicious Dragon had suggested the reshot image was weak across the bottom so in recropping the image, I decided after all to include the grass and also the full depth of the interesting rock mid bottom. The grass does take away from the completely abstract feel of the 2005 image but I think does provide an anchor and I don't think it hurts to identify it as a real rockface. Besides, I still have the abstract version which I am not going to hide.

I wanted to warm up the image a little and used photofilter warming to achieve that end - not something I have ever done before but it did the job nicely. I desaturated the blues as being a bit over the top (a side effect of increasing the contrast in the image earlier).