Made with Luminar: Fountain on a Hill

The Fontana dell’Acqua Paolo is sometimes just called “the big fountain” with good reason. It’s pretty big. That creates a photography challenge.  It’s also built on a hill which can make it a challenge to get a photo that looks straight. My original file looks like this:

ISO 640 f/9 1/1250sec 13mm

I’ve used the straighten function within the crop tool and the lens distortion feature in Luminar 3 to deal with that issue:

ISO 640 f/9 1/1250sec 13mm

From there I went to some more creative edits. The Luminar Look applied here is Analog Film. That made for a nice starting point, but it was a dramatic filter, too dramatic for this photo so I’ve made several changes most of which involved moving sliders down. I then added a layer with the filters golden hour, accent ai, and vignette. I’ve used all the filters sparingly. I was looking to boost the natural drama of the fountain in the late afternoon light. Feel free to let me know what you think of the outcome in the comment section below.

The Made with Luminar Series

This image is part of a project I am calling Made with Luminar. What the images in this series have in common is the software used to edit them, Luminar 3. As with my usual blog posts particulars of the camera settings can be found in the caption below the image. The text of these posts include the Luminar “Looks” that have been applied to the photo. Each look is a series of presets that are applied to the photo. Where applicable I will mention what changes I have made to any of the looks. A full explanation of looks is available here on their website, https://skylum.com/luminar/user-guides/chapter-14-working-with-luminar-looks

You can assume other edits have been applied. My most common edits are cropping, detail enhancement, and vignette. Specific questions or thoughts on the image are welcome in the comment section below.

Cheers!

Added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Slope.

 

 

Making an Impression

This is the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola:

ISO 640 14mm f/9.0 1/1000sec

Like many things in Rome, it is both beautiful and imposing.  It was evening time when we were walking past it, so the light was lovely.  Here is the original photo:

ISO 640 14mm f/9.0 1/1000sec

Nice, but it needed a bit of a punch. But first things first, this isn’t the only shot I took of the fountain. In fact, when I was shooting I managed to get a few shots that didn’t have any people in them. I thought that one of those images would be the one I like the best. Nope, as I looked through my photos this one became my favorite, in part because there were people in it. They give a good sense of the scale of this fountain. So in my edit, I made sure that the man’s white shirt had a bit of pop.

I used my wide angle lens to get this shot, and in Lightroom, I used the Lens Correction feature to take care of some of the distortion.  I also cropped the image a bit using the straighten tool within the crop tool.

I like the tones and light in the original photo, but I did want to boost and clarify them, it was my thought that this should be a bit of an aggressive color image, and it was a bit tame as shot. I put a neutral density filter on the image and then boosted the luminance of the various blue tones to get what I was after. I then sharpened the image a bit, but honestly, the other edits had already made the image appear sharper, so I didn’t go nuts with that.

So do you like the edits? Did this image pop out to you and was that a good thing?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Columns and Vertical Lines.