When taking pictures outdoors, you should be conscious of the lighting sources (both direct and reflected) as well as the temperature of the light. When processing outdoor shots, don't assume that the images are colour/white balanced.
Today's shot comes from Nottingham Daily Photo, a nice little blog about life in Nottingham's city centre. This is one of my favourite photography blogs as it's shot from the hip and straight from the heart. You really get a sense of the Photographer's love for his subject matter, in this case the heart of Nottingham.
I love the effect of the shadow from the big wheel on the buildings. To further emphasize this effect, I've restored the focus to the image and made a subtle change to the white/black points using a curves adjustment layer. There are a ton of edges to work with, so I used EasySharp to handle edge sharpening. Noise wasn't an issue here; there was just a touch of noise in the sky which I removed with Noise Ninja. In less than 30 seconds, I managed to kick this image up a notch.
After the Forensic Photoshop treatment
Image analysts and retouchers have the easiest part of the process. With a shot like this, timing is everything. The hard part, the photographer's part, is lugging around the camera in hope that a shot like this will come along. Thankfully for us, he was well prepared.
Check out more daily photo sites by clicking here.
Enjoy.
