Stolen – Image breakdown

Ever find that your most memorable images are the ones that were the hardest to edit?

The image that I am sharing today I called Stolen because I feel like it was stolen from my mind. I had this particular composition in mind for a while but I had to be patient enough for the weather to work in my favour.

I captured the image without any problem, the weather was perfect for me and was not changing every 5 minutes for a change. This is rare and luck in London.

Once I got home, I was excited to start editing. As you might already know, my edits usually start selections. I can tell you right now that it was the easiest part of completing this image. Since I’ve been working these style of edits for a while, my selections have come a long way. It takes me a less time than it use to be. For this image, I had only 18 selections to work with.

Below you will find the starting image.

Stolen – Starting image

I started by working on each part individually until I came up with a base cohesive image that I could work with. However, I hated the outcome as it was too dark, the details were completely lost. The only thing else to do in these circumstances is simply to start again.

I restarted again and ended up with something else that I completely hated. Thinking back, the reason why I hated each of those images was simply because the image did not balance out. With the foreground standing out, it needed to be darker so that it is not distracting the viewer.

Even when I edited with this theory in mind, it still did not work so I went to bed and went back to the image for a third time.

The following day, I decided to play with curves and go try something I use to and mute the tones. Once I was happy with the result, I worked on the contrast and added some light to few area to add highlight.

Here’s the result….

 

Stolen – Finished image

 

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