No 3

[Pete Askew]

Not far from the green door!

Leica M9 35 mm f 1/1.4 ASPH Summilux M, ISO 160, 1/125 s at f 1/6.7. PP (Urban), crop and border in LR

 

[Hamish Gill]

Pete... hope you dont mind ...
what about straightening the pipes

 

[Pete Askew]

Nice idea Hamish but I actually liked the convergence of the electricity pipes!

I'm also beginning to quite like the bleed that you get when you use gradients to create a border in LR. The lack of a decent 'online' border is something I really miss and I don't like the rounded edges you get with a hard vignette.

 

[Hamish Gill]

i like it too ... but how are you getting it so fine ... what am i missing?

 

[Pete Askew]

It took a bit of practice but I find if I start the gradient (for example on the left) with the RH point of the cross hair just touching the outside of the frame and draw the cursor inwards until the left hand point just touches the border (while holding the shift key down to keep the gradient parallel with the edge) - ie the whole gradient is only 2 cross hairs wide - it gives about the right size and is reasonably consistent. Then reduce the exposure to the minimum. You can the tweak the size if you need after. The only problem with this way of producing borders is if there is a strong highlight at the edge. For example on the LH side here:

Ricoh GR Digital III PP and border in LR

 

[Hamish Gill]

AAAAAAH ... oh yeah, i can do that ... did a bit of that on this

thought you were doing it with "post crop vignette" somehow ...
interesting to know about the shift key to keep it straight though, thats a new one on me ...

another thing you can do with gradients for vignettes is tone them ... although i havent used that yet i was playing with it on something or other the other day ... the problem is where they meet at the corner they double up ... but then i found that you can correct that by applying a third grad over the corner ... although thats not perhaps the most elegant solution

i quite like the highlight on that side ... makes it more rustic looking ... does adjusting the brightness as well as the exposure help with that? ... either that or some very close in local adjustment might fix it??

 

[Ralph Thornton]

Pete,
Nice capture. IMHO the pipes were angled and look better that way. Especially with the texture and other stuff on the wall. Is this pretty much the natural color of the wall or did you convert to a monotone of some kind?

 

[Paul Lange]

Wiring in foreign countries is great isn't it! The consumer unit in our flat in tripoli used to get roasting hot when more than 2 aircon units were on, the wires inside were black cinders. Like the border, I have experimented with splutter borders like on this shot but they are a little coarse and don't suit all shots.

I this idea Pete, before I've tried a black layer and used the marquee with a feather to delete the middle and leave only a black frame but the blend can be a little too neat.

 

[Pete Askew]

Hamish, yes I di some local correction to help the burn into the border. In general, non-output borders in LR are tricky and I usually go through PS to do them. These gradients are OK but fiddly and rather limted and the toning idea just gets complicated. I've given up trying to get a vignette to look even half decent!

The wall is more or less the colour it was (DDR off-grey/white!) and the wiring around here is often intersting as the used aluminium as the conductor!