Hollywood Blvd Night Shot: Can you optimize this?

This is presented for your own Title and creative intent to imprint on the pictures. There are two copies processed in Adobe RAW, one light and one dark to give more lattitude.






Thanks for your kind interest!

Asher

Hi Asher.
You know how much I love this challenges, alas, my interview with a panel of judges for admittance in university is but a week away, so I am preparing for it with all my energy, I will however, download the images to play with, but I can't warrantee my version b4 the end of next week.

Lovely subject, one that I will be presenting as part of my London portfolio, (two versions, through the eyes of the tourist and through the eyes of the poor) ) not that I am implying this man is poor, his jacket is very clean and so is him, but it does kind of look like hi is.
Wish me luck.

Thanks, Ivan!

You can use whatever technic or crop you want to fulfill you own idea, B&W included!

Asher

Hi Asher,

I thought the guy could do with a bit of sunshine. Less than 2 minutes with Light zone, (just the dark image). Tilted back so I could crop including hat, but leave out chair legs. I'd like to crop a bit more off the shutters. I couldn't be fussed to remove the reflections at top lh corner so cropped that away. A bit of blue haze on the hat, I think.

I don't know what you were after, but thought I'd have a play. Others could do better.



Best wishes,

Ray

My attempt

Heres my take on it, all done in Lightroom:

Hey, this is fun. I like the interpretations posted so far.

My approach was to emphasize the dichotomy of this man's drab, but probably sometimes lively, existence in the midst of a landmark, but often gaudy, street (the Walk of Stars) in L.A.. Here were my dance steps.

General adjustments in LightRoom:

• De-saturated the man's red shirt.
  
• Bumped saturation of the colored light reflections on the pavement and the yellow paint to emphasize the man's gaudy immediate environment.
  
• Slight cropping. I chose to leave most of the pavement in the image, conveying that he's clearly sitting on a sidewalk.

Exported to CS2 for more specific edits.

• Used an variable ND6 gradient (from the DFT 55M suite of tools) to tone-down the distracting bright glare in the upper left and to darken the lower left corner to send the eye straight to the man.
  
• Dodged and burned to bring out the hat, the man's beard, his tattoo, and the newspapers. Also very slightly around the cup (containing a can!) to snap the eye to that as a secondary subject.
  
• Applied a bit of Smart Sharpen.

"Hollywood, Really"

Ok, my interpretation, combo of two conversions - light on top, masked, a couple of masked curve adjustment layers, and a little bit of touch up. No color or saturation adjustments. I thought about cropping out the distractions but really liked the space to the left so found other ways to deal with them, plus I wanted to leave the stars to discover on longer inspection.

Sidewalk Star (I'll bet he's happy in his own little world - cup of java, snug blankey, and a newspaper - what more could you want?



- DL

Really wonderful guys. Can you each add titles to your contributions.

My concept is that a new artistic intention can start de novo at the onset of looking a picture on the screen. Of course one cannot, at this stage, move around in the street, as the original photographer did. Still, there's a lot of room for creative vision.

The power of selective cropping and processing is so great that, essentially the photograph starts an almost completely new life.

I'm interested to see the relationships between the sibling creative versions of one photographer's attempt to make a picture. Since each person makes their own title and can do whatever they want to achieve their vision to make the picture, one is looking at how we handle one set of picture elements to deliver variants of one master set of emotions, ideas, meaning and significance.

I hope we have more contributions. This is fun and I, for one am thrilled and learning from your original approaches.

Asher

BTW,

As Don has done, the photographer's © on the picture helps protect each other's emages

Asher

My title: Shine a little star on me

Sry about the copyright Asher, will fix it later today.

Thanks Jörgen,

I'm just trying to set a standard! If we protect each other, more people will risk sharing their best files!

Asher

Title mine "In other news..."

I added a copyright on the pbase image. It should appear when your servers refesh.

Tom

I like the color renderings so far. Very creative.

Tom's B&W is well done. any more B&W or toned versions or perhaps two colors?

Asher