Editing Verona Park Bridge

Goal

The goal with this image is to create an award-winning image for the county park system to use in their “advertisement” of the park system. My idea for this one was to capture the iconic bridge (in a county park) on a beautiful sunny day. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate with my intent but I was able to get a nice shot anyway.

The Images

Before & After

Starting image — unedited scan — Starting Image

Nikon N70 · Fuji 400 · Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 (~f/4–f/8, ~1/30s) · Matrix metering · Tripod · Variable ND2–400 filter · Scanned to ~20 MB JPEG by lab

Shot on a tripod with a variable ND2–400 filter pushed toward the 400 side to allow a slow enough shutter speed (~1/30s) to render some motion blur on the person crossing the bridge. The negatives were scanned to approximately 20 MB JPEGs by the lab.

Step One

Base Layer

I started with a crop in a 5:4 ratio, since the contest requires the image to be printed on 8″×10″ paper. The crop was chosen to select the elements most important for competition—the iconic landmark, a person crossing for a bit of action (unfortunately not many people were crossing the bridge that day), and the lake the park is also known for.

There is only a very small adjustment to the black point and white point on the levels tool. The rest of the work is done on portions of the image.

Levels adjustment panel — minor black and white point shift

Mask 1

Sky

This mask was created with the AI select brush and then refined and feathered. I was trying to bring out some more detail from the sky using the levels midpoint.

There’s also an adjustment of brightness with the Luma Curve.

Mask 2

Foreground

This mask was generated by cloning the sky mask and inverting it to get the complement of the sky. The goal here was to increase the contrast in the foreground a bit. I upped the saturation slightly (+13) and lowered the midtone brightness on the levels tool to compress the shadows and lower highlights:

The Luma Curve from the sky mask is also applied here.

Mask 3

Linear Gradient — Water

Capture One — linear gradient mask on the water

This mask was used to lower the saturation (−73) of the water, muting the greens of the reflected trees. This balanced out the image a bit and is a pretty subtle change.

After — water saturation reduced — After

Before — water saturation reduced — Before

Mask 4

Linear Gradient — Sky

Capture One — linear gradient mask on the sky

This mask is added to help bring back some detail in the sky. It’s a Luma Curve adjustment that targets the highlights mostly:

After — sky gradient mask applied — After

The net effect here is to bring in some more shadow to the bottom of the cloud cover.

Mask 5

Specular Highlights on the Water

Capture One — specular highlights mask on water

This mask was added to make the water pop a bit. The construction was a little challenging: the mask was created by adding a linear gradient and then subtracting a linear gradient going in the opposite direction, then cleaning up with the eraser tool. This gives a gradual increase in mask effect from both edges, with maximum effect at the center of the reflections.

The exposure was increased just above two-thirds of a stop (+0.77) and the brightness was brought up a bit as well (+24).

After — specular highlights mask applied — After

Before — specular highlights mask — Before

Result

Final Image

That brings us to the final image:

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