Project 2 - Adjustments

I tackled this one first because I thought it would be easy. Of course I was wrong. I started off well, duplicating the color image so I have a working copy. I put that working copy and the goal photo on a split screen and off I went trying adjustments to Levels, Hue/Saturations, Variations, Curves. My first frustration was that I get in a hurry to try the next thing in my bag of tricks and I forget to write down what I'm doing. I know the goal here is to learn how to make adjustments, not just duplicate John's photo. So even if I get everything just right with a hit and miss approach, it does me no good if I can't remember how I got there. So I have to keep reminding myself to slow down, think about what I'm doing and write it down as I go. Thank God for the history window.

I started off adjusting the Levels - it looked heavy on blue. Then I adjusted Hue/Saturation and reduced the saturation to almost, but not quite, black and white. Next I spent a lot of time in the Variations window. I like the variations window and find it easy to work with because it gives me a preview of the changes with my options before I select them. But I'm frustrated that the window is so large that it blocks the goal photo that I'm trying to match. I played around with the midtones, adding red, too much red, adding cyan, overdoing darkening then lightening it up. Then I revisited Levels and Hues/Saturations. I ended up with Hue 34, Saturation 18, Lightness -17. By this time I thought the street looked pretty close but the sky was too dark. I used the Curves function, selected a point on the sky and lightened it up without messing up the rest of the work I had done. (My input was 136 and output 186 on the Curves)

I'm about 85% happy with the way the photo turned out. But I've learned a valuable lesson to slow down and document what I'm doing.

So here's my adjusted photo:


And here's the goal photo: