mouse-over for before view
Having a great time revisiting the Jura region of eastern France, but before the winter snow arrives once again we revisited the retro fire truck I last captured in the spring snow and blogged several months back. But this time I tried a slightly more surreal composition with a dramatic starry sky overlay!
Shot this time in the late afternoon sun with a normal lens, the resulting raw image was disappointingly bright and crisp and so first I dismissed it, however on second thoughts I thought I’d try running it through a few of our Nik Flypaper presets to help tone it down and harmonise the colours.
I used Fly Orford Graves 2, with the Darken Centre ticked to really darken the sky.
I then saved it and opened it again in Nik colour Pro, this time I used: Fly 3 Amanda 3 Preset which knocked the colours back and finally finished with: Fly 2 Skull Dominos Preset.
For a final soft and further tone down I created a new Fly Preset for Nik Analog, which we’ll release as soon as we have enough, however, for now if you want to make your own, this preset softened the edges and further toned down the colour, a fairly simple Preset.
Here I could have easily left the image, but decided I wanted to balance the top half more, so had the idea of adding a star image overlay, simply overlaid with Luminosity @ 100% .
Once again I could have left it there but events move fast on the Net and my attention was caught by our old portrait educator friend, Thomas Churchwell, the famous New York pro photographer who had been posting some masterly painterly effect images on Face Book of dreamy romantic models using Flypaper Textures in combination with the new Topaz Impression filter. Being a ‘Gotta have it!’ – person I had to try it straight away and as by chance the Fire Truck was open and so I had a quick play and settled on the watercolour 2 filter. I used this as a 62% overlay in Normal, removing any cheap looking effects around the edges which were too rough and the tree skyline looked a little scrappy as did the stars, so these were brushed off, but I loved the Trucks softer edges and the bottom half of the image.
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Finally, to beef the whole thing up and add interest to the now too dark bottom, I applied 2 Flypaper Textures, the first beefed up, Caspian @ soft light 100% and a new Fly Edge 2 number 35 Vivid light @ 100% showing the bottom Text strongly with the rest mostly brushed away.
Fly Nik Color pro 2 Orford Graves 2, with the Darken Centre ticked
Fly Nik Color pro 3 Amanda 3 Preset
Fly Nik Color pro 2 Skull Dominos Preset.
Fly Preset Fire Truck for Nik Analog (to be published)
Starry Sky layer overlay Luminosity @ 100%
Topaz Impression filter – Watercolour 2 filter @ 62% overlay in Normal mode
Caspian @ soft light 100%
Fly Edge 2 no. 35 Vivid light @100% – Top half brushed away.
Please visit our Pack page or Combo Pack page to buy Flypaper Textures. Or our Preset Page to buy Nik Presets.
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