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I'm still working my way through the shots taken a few weeks back during an outing to Cockatoo Island with Matt K. Here are two for critique. More can be found HERE

The first two images here are a before and after version of the same shot which hopefully shows the feel I was going for with the image.

My first impression of the first image was hmmm....'uninteresting clump of metal' but after scrolling down to see the reworked one, wow, I am impressed, thats nice work to be able see the potential in such a scene.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but is that one very, very large chuck on a very, very large lathe? if so..that is a very very large bit of machinery!

I am interested in the PP you used on it, if you care to share it of course, a bit of d-lighting, contrast and warmth...at a guess.

biggerry wrote:Correct me if I am wrong here, but is that one very, very large chuck on a very, very large lathe? if so..that is a very very large bit of machinery!

Everything on Cockatoo Island is big - it was where they built some bloody big ships

biggerry wrote:I am interested in the PP you used on it, if you care to share it of course, a bit of d-lighting, contrast and warmth...at a guess.

PP is a tough one - this is a rough recall of what I did. My steps were as follows:
- Import to Lightroom. Some minor tweaks to fill light and brightness there
- export to Photoshop for editing to do stuff not possible (yet) in LR
- distort image to make the object less oval and more round
- Nik Color Efex Remove Color Cast to adjust the WB (could have done this in LR)
- apply Nik Color Efex Bleach Bypass filter (this is the key to the look) I used some pretty extreme settings of +90% for brightness, +95% saturation, -60% for global contrast and +90% for local contrast
- used Nik Color Efex darken lighten centre to vignette the image (ligher centre, darker edges) could have done that in LR too
- back to LR
- bumped warmth and saturation
- increased blacks slightly
- use new LR2 brush to dodge the entire lower half of the disc
- slight sharpen and export to web

Below is a side by side before and after the bleach bypass. You can see how much it pushes the sharpness of the edges without blowing the whites like a straight contrast or curves adjustment would.

Click for larger

PP is a tough one - this is a rough recall of what I did. My steps were as follows:

WOW - the bleach treatment and the distortion (or would you classify that as un-distortion ) really makes this image.

Thanks for sharing the process, I appreciate your insight to see what made the final picture!