Grace Under Pressure!

Recently I was approached by a client to create a 60 inch canvas print of Joondalup Resort.

The client needed the print urgently and I had to capture the image as well as process, print & stretch it. They also wanted it mainly black and white with green and red colours highlighted around the image.

I love a challenge and this was a great opportunity to learn a few new techniques so I trotted of to Joondalup Resort to capture some images. The weather was pretty bad so it was quite fortuitous that the image was to be mainly black & white as no blue skies were to be seen, in fact it was pretty cloudy and windy with the threat of rain.

Joondalup Resort has an amazing pool area overlooking the golf course with some beautiful flowing curves which lead the eye straight to the resort entrance if you are positioned correctly.

I knew the final image was to be panoramic so I positioned myself so that the sun loungers were visible on the left side of the pool with the large palm tree to the right and made sure the leading lines were drawing the viewer into the image. I was also able to place the intended highlighted greens and reds to either side of the image to further enhance the effect of the leading lines and balance the image nicely.

As you can see above the original image was a bit dull and lifeless so I applied a few of my favourite processing techniques in Lightroom & Photoshop to give it a bit of bling. I then added a Black & White adjustment layer and settled on the Yellow preset to give the image the tones and contrast that I was looking for.

I already had a good idea of where I wanted the greens and reds highlighted while keeping the majority of the image black and white. However I have never actually tried to isolate specific colours in an image before in this way so I quickly Googled the technique and decided to use the Color Range function in Photoshop to get a good starting point.

With a very rough selection of the colours I wanted it was time to add a layer mask to the Black & White adjustment layer and start brushing around the edges of the green and red areas. This was a fairly time consuming process but I can’t think of an easier way to get the exact selection I needed to isolate the colours.

Sadly my PC is playing up a bit at the moment and is prone to random crashing, so it was inevitable that Murphy’s Law would come into play and I ended up losing about an hours worth of brush work when the Blue Screen of Death hit me! Why I left it so long between saves is beyond me, I guess the necessary level of concentration in such work just got the better of me and time flew by. I really must get around to ordering that new PC 🙂

With the brush work done on the B&W layer mask the image was virtually complete, though I must admit that the impact of it didn’t really hit me until I loaded the finished file back into Lightroom and applied the panoramic crop.

Wow! Cutting out the sky and foreground really made the colour highlights jump out and the power of those leading lines really hit home. I took a picture of the printed canvas with my iPhone and emailed it to the client and all she could say was

“Omg… eeeeekkkkkkk
That’s amazing!!!!

Thank you :-)”

When I get a response like that from a customer it makes me realise why I love my work so much 🙂

A big thank you to our client for giving me such an enjoyable challenge 🙂