Exercise 3.04 – Interpretive processing

For this exercise I’ve used an image of the sanctuary in Castlerigg stone circle. The original Raw image was quite flat, due to the overcast weather conditions.
The first image is the first conversion to Tiff, using Adobe Raw within Photoshop. I reduced the exposure by 1.05 stops, increased the recovery by +95, increased the contrast to +40 and slightly reduced the clarity to -5.

I felt this treatment recorded the feeling of the place.
I wanted to create an image that portrayed a mysticism, so I processed the image again – this time using Lightroom.
I increased the exposure by 0.25 stops, brightness to +76 and contrast to maximum. Clarity was reduced to -49, vibrance to -65 and saturation to -27. These settings created a fairly high key image with significantly reduced colour – I didn’t want completely monochrome as I felt this would detract from the ‘mystical’ quality I was looking for.
To further polarize the sanctuary I wanted to reduce the impact of the surrounding landscape, so I used a white vignette – again from Lightroom.

Further additions could be made – a light on the centre stone, or an imported Druid, but I think this image does what I wanted.
For the third image I wanted to create a dark, foreboding feeling.
I opened the first image in Photoshop, duplicated the layer and treated it with Topaz Labs Adjust 5 plug in, in Charcoal sketch mode. I used ‘soft light’ blending mode (90% opacity) over the original layer, then stamped up the layers (Layer 1).
The burn tool was used to darken the sky in layer 1
A B&W adjustment layer was used to convert the image to monochrome and the layers again stamped up (Layer 2)
Layer 2 was placed in ‘lighten’ blending mode over Layer 1, then the image flattened.

This doesn’t look like a place you’d want to stay in for very long. A place where dark things may happen! Again, I retained some of the colour, but this time much darker.
I think I achieved my ideas in each of the images. I’m sure that they could each be further enhanced, but I’m happy with the results I obtained.