Epic Edits Weblog

Another of my photos from my trip to Europe. There are parts of Neuchatel (and other cities) in Switzerland that are bursting with colorful graffiti. This one kind of struck me mostly because of the orange wall with 6 foot lettering on it. The fact that somebody spray-painted the word “fonky” (which I’m assuming was “funky” at one point) right in front of it kind of made me laugh, so I took a picture. I wish I had been paying more attention to my composition, because I ended up cropping the bottom of the “J” a little bit. Oh well, too late now.

The JPEG image (1) actually had colors that were pretty close to the real colors. I decided that I wanted to warm it up a little bit with the RAW conversion (2). I also adjusted the image for less contrast during the conversion, because I knew I was going to need it for the next step. I duplicated the image into a new layer and applied a Hard Mix layer blend (3) at 48% opacity and 48% fill. This blend really boosts the contrast and color saturation, so I needed to start with a fairly dull image so I didn’t clip the highlights or shadows. I still had a little bit of room to play on the histogram, so I applied levels and curves adjustment layers (4). For the levels, I brought the black point up to 7 and the white point down to 230. The curves adjustment was just a very slight “S” curve to help bring the mid-tone contrast up. On top of these adjustment layers (5), I created a new empty layer and did a “Stamp Visible” command (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) to create a merged copy of the image and adjustments into the new layer. Then I duplicated it one more time. The first copy got a Color Dodge layer blend at 20% opacity and 9% fill — this brightened the highlights a bit more. The second copy got a Color Burn layer blend at 21% opacity and 11% fill — this darkened the shadows a bit more. The final step was to copy the merged output again into a new layer using the Stamp Visible command, and apply sharpening using the Unsharp Mask.

Photo by Brian Auer
03/05/07 Neuchatel, Switzerland
Funky Jazz Graffiti
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
75mm equiv * f/4.5 * 1/30s * ISO100