The Palouse Guy

Red Barn near St. John by Gary Hamburgh - All Rights Reserved

Sometimes you capture an image that you like because of the composition but the conditions don’t show the vision that you pictured in your mind. I have found that using EFX Color Pro by Nik software can add some “pop” to an image that otherwise would be very ordinary. I talked about this package in an earlier post but I just want toe reemphasize its usefulness.

The original image at the top of the page shows the finished image that I had hoped to achieve. I will go through the workflow that I used to create this image. The first photo below shows the image as I captured it in camera. I liked the composition and the basic elements, but I knew there were several things that needed to be done to satisfy my eye.

Red Barn near St. John original

First I imported the image into my Aperture library and added a bit of vibrancy and straightened the image slightly. Next I removed the telephone pole in the left side of the image using Photoshop CS3. At that point the image was ready for a little extra “pop” . I used the EFX Color Pro plugin for Aperture in my workflow to help me accomplish this. The first step was to add the Tonal Contrast filter to the image which gave me the result as it appears below.

Red Barn near St. John with tonal contrast filter

My final step was to add the polarizing filter that is available to give a bit more definition to the clouds. The final image is shown once again below and I think these slight modifications create more impact.

Red Barn near St. John by Gary Hamburgh - All Rights Reserved

Remember as you are shooting, always capture the best image you can in camera and then provide slight modifications to add the impact you seek. I have found EFX Color Pro by Nik software to be an extremely helpful package for this purpose.