It's A Big Day At The Gallery

It's not that today's image is the big deal. Last night we installed Windows 7 on the primary computer. So far it's just to test it out, and so far, it looks good. The one gotcha I've seen is in the area of networking. As I tried to get online the computer said there wasn't a network cable connected. (Duh, ya, dar is.) It's been connected since last November when we installed the Intel Core i7 based machine. I've been fussing with the settings for about an hour this morning and couldn't figure out what was going on. Finally I disconnected the computer from the router and plugged it directly into the cable modem. It's pretty obvious that it worked, 'cause you're reading this. It went online with no problem once the router was bypassed. That's not any sort of permanent solution, but it works for now. From the looks of the license plate on today's image you can probably tell it's from our weekend in Maine. If you want to know anything about the image, hit the "read more".
 I've been pretty faithful about connecting the GPS unit to the camera lately whenever we're out of the immediate area. Last weekend was no exception. I can get back to this truck any time we head back up to Maine (if I wanted to). I clicked on the metadata in Adobe Lightroom and went to the GPS data. Popped on that, it opened Google Maps and took us right to the location of the truck. Pretty cool. It also showed that there was a user picture taken at that spot. Clicked on it and up came a 360 degree image of the area. I spun it around and lo and behold, there was the truck. That cracked me up. Okay, so I know I can return to reshoot this truck any time we feel like taking a 400 mile (one way) drive. I don't think it's going to be high on the todo list any time soon.


Last night a couple of friends were over and I showed them the little GPS trick. One is a JPEG shooter and commented that the color on the truck was "pretty dull". I took that as a slight challenge and knew I had found today's image. I pumped up the colors using the usual techniques (several previous posts have detailed my workflow) and then added some touches strictly needed on this image. The windows reflected too much green, making them look more like they belonged on an alien spaceship than a rusted out old truck. I did a selection of the three windows (the two front and the driver's side)and pulled the saturation down a lot. The first time I pulled the slider down the entire image desaturated. Oops. Easily corrected by clipping the Adjustment Layer to the copy of the image in the layer below. The other work that this image got was quite a bit of Dodging and Burning. I opened the shadows under the truck ever so slightly (trust me, it can be seen in the original) and under the bough to the left. The hood got a some Burning on the sides to give a little dimension. The two red lights on the fenders were touched with a little bit of a Burn just so they wouldn't overpower the rest of the image. There's all sorts of little hits with either the Burn or Dodge tool around the truck itself to pull some things forward and push other things back.

It was a fun development of an image and I don't think my friend can say it's "pretty dull" anymore.