Before & After 79

This game is to help those of us who are trying to learn new tricks when it comes to editing.

Here's the breakdown of the game. I will post a picture that I choose, resized. Outside of being resized it has to be unedited...meaning no adjustments to any levels, it has to look like it did as it came out of the camera.

The game will last 48hrs and whoever can produce the best edited image (as judged by me) will be picked and it'll be their turn to post their unedited picture for all of us to take a crack at.

The participants must have their "Image Editing OK" turned on and they must provide at least a simple breakdown of how they edited the image, some entrants are a little vague on this point, please give us all details so we can learn and share tips. For instance if you use the unsharp mask tool or Smart Sharpen, provide us with the adjustments you used so others can try them out.

You can post multiple images, but the first image you post will be the one that is judged - all other images will be considered for knowledge and tip use only.

Also, please keep all comments, be they positive or negative, to yourself until after the game has ended.

If you happen to be the winner of the game please start the next one with the title of the game and the following number. For example…the next game should read (Before and After #80.)

This is all about having fun so have at it!!!

Ending time: July 9th 10pm. Be there or be square

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This one was begging to be mirrored

- Lens correction to straighten the buildings
- Duplicated layer then flipped one image horizontally
- Brought the two layers together to create a mirror image
- Crop
- Adjusted Shadow/Highlight, levels and saturation
- USM
- Vignette
- Border

I liked this photo was fun to edit.

-Low key filter on mask on the clouds
-Brightness/contrast on a mask on the clouds as well
-Then finally a surface blur to reduce the noise on the clouds and this layer was a mask too
-Tonal Contrast filter on a mask on the buildings brought this down to 50%
-Pro Contrast filter using the same mask on another layer
-Yet another layer using the same mask duplex layer giving that browner tint to the bricks
-Foliage filter to enhance the trees a bit
-Border

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I agree 100% with Lee123 that this photo was screaming to be reflected. It was a hard one for me. I'm not great yet with replacing backgrounds but I gave it a shot here.

*cropped
*straightened
*mirrored side by side then flipped and put together.
*painted sky
*painted water
*added foliage/trees
*enhanced color
*sharpened overall then went back and softened areas.
(I was going for a castle feel)

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Wow. Lee123 I don't know how you did it, but I can never make my saturation levels look anything like that. I have been trying for a bit to make my sky edits look at deep blue as yours there.

I copied part of the image and pasted it twice to elongate the block.
Added new sky on overlay.
Used the cloning tool on the trees to get them not quite so repetitive.
Levels layer.
Exposure layer.
Played with shadows/highlights.
Sharpened.
Border.

Looks like a high dollar apartment building Suzyb. Very well done. The dimensions are great.

Note: This is not an official submission. Been having too many time constraints lately to participate, unfortunately, but I had a few minutes this morning.

Opened in ACR - Boosted contrast, blacks, fill light, removed most saturation, lowered exposure to least possible.

In PS3:
Nik Midnight - 100% sky, ~10% top of buildings, 0% elsewhere
Added a firework from my own image
Light Brown/Yellow layer - horizontally masked to give the appearance of light coming off the firework
Boosted global contrast
Blurred the entire image (sounds counter productive, but it makes the contrast and lighting effects look more natural)

Ok so I had no clue what to do and also couldn't figure out how everyone cloned out the blue thing. So I came up with this.

-Duplicated and flipped image.
-added contrast
-did a color balance
-low key filter
-added ladybugs
-border

Ok so my ideal was Ladybug family on vacation!!! hehe

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LOL @ the ladybug family vacation. too cute & original

TheSonofDarwin wrote in post #5865697
Note: This is not an official submission. Been having too many time constraints lately to participate, unfortunately, but I had a few minutes this morning.

Opened in ACR - Boosted contrast, blacks, fill light, removed most saturation, lowered exposure to least possible.

In PS3:
Nik Midnight - 100% sky, ~10% top of buildings, 0% elsewhere
Added a firework from my own image
Light Brown/Yellow layer - horizontally masked to give the appearance of light coming off the firework
Boosted global contrast
Blurred the entire image (sounds counter productive, but it makes the contrast and lighting effects look more natural)

Realism... that's something I've seem to have lost

The clouds almost look like smoke. That's cool.

So I tried to just keep it simple.
I thought I wanted to do a black and white photo so thats where I started...
Can't remember exactly what I did because I would play for a while then give up and go back to it later...
So... what I remember was I lowered the brightness a little
used the clone tool to clean up lower right corner.. got rid of the blue and extended the windows over
cropped
used smudge tool to make the cloud just at the top of the right building a little bigger because it was driving me crazy the way it almost seemed to follow the jagged roof
converted to black and white
I just couldn't get it to "pop" the way I wanted it to...looked really flat
so I sharpened
changed it to sepia

I think that was everything....

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Ok so its about 6 minutes before deadline, so Ill go ahead and call it.

LuckyStar08, your edit made me go 'whoa' when i was checkn out the posts. Very creative in not only the duplication of the building but then to create the waterfront. Nicely done, congrats.

Congrats LuckyStar08...your edit definitely made me wanna go there for my next vacation

Congrats LuckyStar08. I'm looking forward to the next one.