We rented an apartment in a castle in South West England. Thornbury Castle has been around since the 11th century in one form or another. After a pleasant night in one of the nicest bedrooms in the Western World, we explored the surrounding ruins of the castle. This scene here appears to be from one of the gate houses that serviced the western entrance of the grounds. It needed more than a little bit of cleaning up, but it serves as a great image
For the sake of honesty, this is what the original, unedited image looked like.
When editing this image, my absolute priority was to keep the detail as high as possible. There is a huge spectrum of colors and shades in this photo, as well as textures which promise a great image. Because of this, I edited this photo over several days, and exercised my “24 Hour Rule” several times. This is a very busy image and there was always something I spotted that needed fixing. In CS6, the clone tool was imperative as was spot / patch healing. Testing exposure at various levels was nerve racking. I don’t think I could have gotten anywhere near the final image without my pen and tablet. Lightroom 4 and the vignette helped a wee bit.
Update: Having delved into the world of Photoshop plugins, I came across Alien Skin Exposure 7. Exposure 7 attempts to recreate the analog films used before the advent of digital photography. I was on the fence about it, but I was interested in their Blowup 3 enlargement plugin. Since all three were on sale at a considerable discount, I made the jump. Exposure 7 proved to be well worth the cost. Using this image, I used a Fuji Film Preset with a warm tone, but reduced grain to zero for the benefit of my phobia about noise. Not a bad effect and well worth the minimal effort.
Regards.
The Digital Lens 