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To the right is a screenshot of my Layers pallette in Photoshop. Actually, this still doesn't even show several more layers that I flattened beforehand, and several other minor adjustments that I have made since, but it gives you a general idea of the kind of work that goes into a shot like this. I would guess that I logged about 10 total hours on this one, which is much more than my images usually require.
- As you look through my pallette, working from the bottom, you will see that the first thing I did was use a B&W adjustment layer for some subtle contrast (simply change the blend mode to Soft Light).
- I then used a simple "defog" action that I wrote to add a little bit of midtone contrast.
- I forget what I did in the next layer, but above that you'll see that I made use of a Photoshop plugin called Imagenomics Portraiture to clean up their faces a little bit.
- The barrel distortion layer fixed the "lean" of my buildings so that they stood straight up (check the before & after image again to see the change a little better).
- I later desaturated the image slightly using another B&W adjustment layer, and then dropped in a new sky.
- The sky was too warm to match the lighting in the scene, so I cooled it off with a Photo Filter.
- Next I made use of yet another plugin, called Topaz Adjust. I absolutely love this plugin for adding local contrast and a variety of other effects.
- Some other minor adjustments were made next-- a High Pass layer for some contrast and selective sharpening, and a screen layer with a mask to selectively brighten a couple of the band members' faces.
- Then some dodging and burning for selective contrast
- A Hue/Sat layer to take some of the redness and saturation out out the guitarist's face (I actually took his whole body from a completely different photo (lots of compositing going on for this shot)
- I then had to work on the sky with some blur to remove noise
- Next I ran my defog action again, but masked out everything but the buildings in the background.
- Lastly (but not really, since there were other steps later), I did some more dodging and burning.
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