Before & After: Abstract Blue Sunset

The other day I was outside playing with my boys when I looked up and saw a triangle silhouette against a rich, gradient blue. Contrast, shapes, colors and silhouettes are all common characteristics of abstract photography so I ran inside to get my camera to capture the scene.

I’m on a clean editing only streak right now, but since this is an abstract shot and I haven’t used textures in editing in an obvious way lately, I thought it would be fun to dust off my collection of textures and play around!

Hover over the image below or click the following link for the shot specs and SOOC!

Photography Notes

I have a deep love for gradients in sunset photographs and this might be the first time I’ve captured a blue gradient sky!

I metered against the blue of the sky and composed my shot to show the slant of my roof intersecting the setting sun.

Photo Editing Notes

In Adobe Camera RAW, I bumped up the blacks to make the roof look like more of a silhouette.

I brought the image over into Photoshop CS3 and did a quick clean edit on it just to increase the contrast a bit.

Since this is abstract, I feel freer to play around with reality.

I used Love That Shot‘s Garden Lights Photo Veil to add some fake bokeh/sunflare.

They used to offer this texture free in a set when signing up for their newsletter, but I’m not sure if they still do.

After playing around with all my blending modes, I set the first texture layer to Color Dodge blending mode at around 20% opacity and 90% fill. I like the darkening effect it has on the house and sky, but the bokeh isn’t very prominent.

I duplicate the layer by dragging it to the blank paper icon at the bottom of the layers palette and set the second texture layer to Soft Light blending mode around 40% opacity which brings out the bokeh nicely.

Linking Up

I’m linking up this entry with Pixel Perfect’s Before and After as well as The Daily Wyatt’s Texture Thursday. More awesome weekly link ups can be found on my Be Inspired page.

Also, if you use Blogger or Self-Hosted WordPress for your site and want to know how to change the image on mouseover as I did with the photo above, please check out my new screencast on using an image mouseover to compare shots.