Like I said in the blog about the location this photo was taken, it just looked slightly interesting compositionally and I needed a break from driving. So lets throw this into Photoshop and see what we can do.
The first thing I always do is adjust my saturation and contrast levels. At this stage I've decided it's about the car, so I adjust to make the car look like I want it to. I'm not concerned with any other elements in the photo, just the car. I've also started painting out my front license plate, hehe.
Next up for me is to add some "depth of field" to the image. I like to use focus to drive the eye and ,in this case, I want to also use focus to draw the eye away from the extremely boring background.
Now I've started to to a bit more work. First I've darkened the corners, I'm not sure what natural effect causes this but I really enjoy the look. To me it places the subject "out there" and sets you back from it, it makes me feel like a voyeur and observer. The second thing I've done is to start desaturating areas, specifically the bright sky and very "rich" background dirt pile. I've also removed visual detail from the foreground, kind of "posterizing" it. At this point it's clear what the focal point is, and you have no choice but to look at it, the annoying background is also becoming slightly less annoying.
The foreground still bothers me, it seemed out of place and washed out. So I darkened it more, realizing at this point I would be cropping the photo to make it very horizontal. I've also added back in some color to the asphalt as it gets closer to the car. Again I did this to drive the eye and to "sew" in the foreground visually as it gets closer to the subject matter.
Final piece done!!!! After I cropped the photo, the first thing that I wanted to do was to remove the clashing color of the graphiti, so it went to green. I also continued to add color into the foreground to keep the eye in that area. The background is still kind of distracting, but at this point I'm pretty much done.
To make this a totally complete and finished piece I would continue to work on the background to make it disappear more. At the end of the day however, it's a pretty cool looking little image considering that it is just a snapshot with almost no thought put to it and only about 2 hours of post work. :-) But after writing this, I believe I will go back and do some more work on this piece, I don't suppose anything is ever really done.
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