Workflow

Chuck asked about my workflow, having commented on my 'wood abstract' image. For a detailed discussion I refer you to the four articles I wrote for Outback Photo.

More particularly, Chuck is right, this image was not only cropped, it was rotated 90 degrees which doesn't often happen. the sequence was:

- camera raw 1 size up output to photoshop - 16 bit of course
- tried various crops - the whole image was of a tree trunk and included air space on either side but I wanted to concentrate on the weathering patterns. I ended up with a tall skinny crop and thought it would look better on it's side, subject to odd shadows not being a problem - there weren't any
- some increase in contrast and darkening in the light area to the left
- cloning out a dark branch that cut across the lower left corner
- Akvis Enhancer (full strength for a change)
- smart sharpen
- general tonal adjustments
- conversion to black and white using Russell Brown technique of two hue adjustment layers, the lower one set to colour and the hue slider used to 'filter' the black and white image to taste
- further contrast and tonal adjustments both globally and locally once it was in black and white to suit.

I don't think this is a particularly strong image and I doubt I'll ever get round to printing it - I confess I was scrounging old files for something to show that hadn't been displayed before. That said, the workflow is fairly typical. I try to remember to smart sharpen first before doing the akvis enhancing - but I forgot in this case and it didn't seem to matter - sometimes the changes akvis creates to increase local contrast, when sharpened, go really wild but I got away with it in this image.