While on a trip to the Flyde coastline for our anniversary we stayed in St Annes on Sea which has a lovely old pier which I discovered through the excellent and inspiring photography of David J. Nightingale. Since we were there I couldn’t pass up the chance to photograph the same pier, I already new the result wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as David’s but having subscribed to his awesome Photoshop tutorials on post processing (which I highly recommend to anyone) I hoped I could at least put some of the knowledge I gained into practice.
St Anne's Pier on the Flyde Coast - Processed in Photoshop
Exif: Nikon D80, Tamron 17-50mm, 1/60sec @ f/9, 17mm, 0EV
The conditions weren’t great while we were there but on the last evening we were in the area the rain and high winds stopped long enough for us to go out and get some shots at sunset. funnily enough the next day (on which we were due to head home) the weather was great.
Processing
In Lightroom I increased the exposure by a third of a stop and adjusted the clarity and vibrance to +60 and +53 respectively. I then took the image into Photoshop and used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to increase the saturation in the blues and yellows and then applied a custom curve to increase the contrast throughout the image. I then applied some noise reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware and saved the image back into Lightroom before exporting (applying sharpening for screen).
Below is the original version along with some processing in Lightroom instead of Photoshop.
St Anne's Pier on the Flyde Coast
He has a free tutorial at http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/curves/ (which is also the basis of further tutorials) so you can get a taste of what you’ll be signing up for. Well worth the money in my opinion.
It’s a cracker! Your photoshop work really helps an already great photo. I need to take your recommendation at looking at David Nightingale stuff…