Statue - Before and After

This was taken somewhere in Paris. (If anyone recognizes it, let me know). I usually don't photograph someone else's art, but the intention was a vacation memory. I always hated the background, and worked on several ways to improve it (straigtening, mild desat, etc).

Finally, I took it all the way down to black and liked that. Then I bumped the saturation and added some noise. High pass filter for texture, and finally got a presentation I like.

Any thoughts?

Rad

5DII
1/40
f/4.5
iso 6400
50mm (Canon 28-135)

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2 things would make this picture better. Fix the tilt,it's leaning left a lil and get rid of the background completely.

pretty awful.
You took somebody else's art and messed with it.
Why would you want to add noise? lol
neither photo do anything for me. The first would be categorized as a "P&S vacation-memory shot"..

Something like this,maybe BW?

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a bit of selective adjustments would be in order I think.

Instead of doing the entire picture perhaps just changing the color of the statue and the mount.

then make the background completly black as in the BW version you posted.

So you went somewhere, took a picture and you don't know where it is? You might want to add a notebook to you gear list.

In any sort of conversion, I doubt you want to lose detail where you had it before. For example, the hair on the back of the first figure's head. In the conversion, it's entirely black and blended into the background. For this reason, it doesn't work for me.

To start, you might want to do a simple levels and curves adjustment to darken the background and keep the details in midtones and highlights to your liking. What I did here was crop it slightly and also cloned the background (could have also airbrushed black) to get rid of other distracting elements.

I don't really have an artistic vision for this image, so I left it like this. I think this should be your starting point... then have at it how you see fit.

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The tilt still seems to be a bit off. Even without the reference of the door it is noticeable. You may need to fix the tilt before removing the door frame so you can use it as a reference.

There seems to be a tiny bit of distortion in the image that needs to be fixed. Adjusting the tilt make the doorframe aligned with gridlines throws the image further off.

neil_r wrote in post #13394776
So you went somewhere, took a picture and you don't know where it is? You might want to add a notebook to you gear list.

Something I always beat myself up over if I've forgotten at home!