I wanted to try something a bit different today. The building in today's shot is an old mill in Richmond Square close to the Seekonk River. By way of explanation, there's a really nice gold dome at the top of this tower, and there was a beautiful deep blue sky behind the bright white structure. I wanted to play a bit in post processing, though, to really emphasize the contrast and textures of the tower itself. It's a study in lines. Now, I toyed with a few different ways of processing this one, but in the end I settled on a low key black and white presentation. There's nothing significant about the building itself - there are others in that square that you'll see at some point because they are significant - but I selected it because it gave me the most flexibility in playing with a few post processing techniques I've been wanting to study.
For post processing, I started in PSE for a change and duplicated the background layer. I then desaturated that layer and brought it into Topaz Adjust. I then applied a low key filter. The light regions were adjusted to 10 (which eliminated some of the low key effect) and I adjusted the adaptive exposure and contrast sliders heavily to produce the extremes in tone that served as the starting point. Strength and Detail Boost were adjusted to bring out the strength of the lines in the tower. All of this created a lot of noise in the background, so I then adjusted noise suppression significantly to eliminated the artificial distortion. Back in PSE, I applied a levels adjustment to brighten the whites and deepen the background even further. The top layer was a sepia photo filter.
