Like With Pie

"Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface."

"And sometimes there's a third even deeper level and that's the same as the top surface one."

"Huh?"

"Like with pie."

- Joss Whedon

I took this on the way to work today. I was struck by the way the niceish oldish building has been (in my view) utterly ruined by a giant LCD screen affixed to its exterior.

I shot this in RAW - as an experiment, largely - one that didn't have particularly positive results, as (I suspect due to limitations in Apple's RAW support) Filterstorm had a bit of trouble: no exif, and half size files. It was interesting though, to see just how flat and dull the RAW looks, compared to jpgs out of the camera.

To get a version with exif (though still half size, supporting my notion it's an Apple thing, not a Filterstorm thing), I opened the RAW in Photoforge2, and saved it without any edits the resulting jpg is what I'll upload to my Occasionally Processed journal). I then opened that in Filterstorm Pro 2 (the app store version; it's almost out) and set to....

I turned on layers, then pulled down the RGB curve, using a mask (which created a second layer with the adjustment and mask) using the color match tool; I also erased the mask frm the edges of parked cars and a couple of other spots, painted a solid mask onto the LCD screen, and used a low opacity brush and eraser around the blue sky and surrounding trees to feather the mask in order to get the result I wanted.

Then...

I raised the luminance in another layer, so it didn't affect the screen, or (very much) the sky, but did brighten the over-dark brick building. I sharpened it a bit, and finally added a slight S to the RGB curve of the main layer (thus it didn't affect the sky or the LCD screen).

That all sounds a lot more complex (and lengthy) than it really was. Basically it's the same semi-dodging/burning kind of thing I've been doing, but I can go into each individual bit of the picture and modify what I've done and what bits are affected by those adjustments - whereas before it was do it right, or do it over.

Large version here.

Unprocessed version here.