Ferry wake

[woodsie]

After a few months in the internet wilderness with limited access I am back on the information superhighway. Thought I would celebrate by posting up a photo I took today on the ferry from Holland to the UK. It was an amazingly smooth ocean today and a lot of photoshop to get the mood I was looking for and remove the affects of sea spray on the lens.

http://Woodsie.smugmug.com/photos/67670827-L.jpg

[JonathanS]

Wow, I really like that. The white contrasts nicely with the dark water- very nice. Excellent photoshoping.

[Nebis]

i love it

[sugarzebra]

A very unique and well done shot. Great.

[Dorman]

Very creative, what effect did you apply, looks almost like a painting.

[woodsie]

Thanks for the comments. Lets see if I can remember what I did, as I tried all sorts of things until I got something I likes.
Took a number exposure brackets to get the detail in the white wash. Ended up with a shot that was slightly under exposed.
Minor crop to remove a little vignetting (Think I didn't put the lens hood on properly) and bits of the ship that made it into the edges of the shot.
Played with curves and levels in the RAW conversion to get the contrast and detail I wanted.
Used the chanel mixer to do a black and white conversion, mainly with the green chanel with a bit of red to bring out some more detail, the detail in the blue chanel was a bit blown out.
Painted out the blemishes from sea spray hitting the lens. (must remember to clean the lens)
Applied one of the photoshop prepackaged trtones to get the colour and mood I wanted.
Used the edge sharpening described in http://ronbigelow.com/articles/sharpen5/sharpen5.htm to clean up the detail in the wake and the ocean.
I was trying all sorts of things to add some grain to some parts of the shot and different ways to get it to look good. I ended up ditching the grain because the clean look was better. So created a duplicate layer. Created a mask so that the sky was 100% and the lighter ocean in the background was about 25%-50%. Then applied a major guassian blur to the mask to get everything blending together. Then selected the Multiply blend mode and a bit of trial and error to see what the effects where.Anyway, here is the original shot as it came straight out of the camera.