Racer

[John 2]

Taken at a local circuit. Processed in Nik Silver Efex.

Nikon D7000
70-300mm Nikkor @ 270mm
1/800th sec @f7.1 ISO 200

[Brownbear]

Hi John,

Amazing image! I adore the detail in those grid parts and even the tires; the spinning wheels (sense of motion), silver tones and especially the beautiful highlights.

[Otavio]

Beautiful! Neat! Very well done, John.

I have to ask: Using F/7.1 on a crop sensor (APS-C; D7000) did you manage to have such shallow DoF or you selected the car, inverted selection and applied lens blur on Post processing?

Cheers,

[dje]

John you have great detail in this shot and it'a a very good mono conversion. Spot on IMO.

Dave

[deetheturk]

Wonderful capture John!

[Shadowman]

Nicely done.

[pnodrog]

Bang on. Love the sharp detail and total absence of any background distractions.

[GregP]

Great image... however, the driver's face looks rather waxy - or is it just concentration?

[Andrew1]

Great DOF John. Did you have work on the face to get it that light? I've always had problems getting definition of faces inside helmets.

[Mike Buckley]

Great conversion! I only wish part of the driver's eyes weren't hidden by the helmet.

The depth of field appears a bit artificial in that it seems to begin and end too abruptly rather than gradually but that doesn't bother me because I chalk it up to artistic license.

[bnnrcn]

Great image

[FootLoose]

Weel captured, John, and beautiful conversion. The driver seems to have a demonic look in his left eye.

[rpcrowe]

I agree - great shot!

[IzzieK]

Agree with everyone's comments. Great shot, John....(sorry, I have to echo Richard's comment.)

[John 2]

Thanks all for a great set of comments.

Greg P/Andrew:
yes I have lightened his face but there is not a lot of detail there and I suspect that in selectively adding contrast, I have darkened the helmet shadow over the eyes and made it look a bit unnatural.

Otavio/Christina:
interested in your comment Otavio. "inverted the image...?" Not familiar with that method but I'm interested to learn about it. Because of the DOF, the BG was already out of focus but still a bit busy. My approach was to select the image of the car and copy it to a new layer. Then, because applying blur always spreads the image a bit, I cloned in the edges of the car on the original layer so that when I pasted the copy back, the edges of the original would not show. I then applied a graduated blur layer to about the top 2/3 of the original, some angled motion blur to the area I front of the car and some to the tyres to give the impression of motion. I then merged the layers.

Mike:
I then made an error. I recently discovered that pushing the "Structure" slider in any of the Nik plug-ins fully to the left blurs an OOF BG even more but strangely doesn't have much if any effect on anything that is sharp in the image. How, I have no idea but it can be useful in natural history shots or to get rid of the striations that JPG skies sometimes suffer from. In this case I noticed some striation to the left of the car and applied a dose of negative structure to the whole image, destroying the graduated blur in the process. What I should have done was to use a control point or just erased the lower half of the NIK layer so that the structure change only applied to the top half. The result would have looked more like the image below (I have left the striations in question untouched but they will have to go). Not perfect but better.

[Mike Buckley]

The depth of field in your revised image appears much more natural. I also like the vignette because it's strong enough to get the job done but subtle enough that I wouldn't have noticed it without directly comparing the two versions.

[Otavio]

Otavio/Christina:
interested in your comment Otavio. "inverted the image...?" [/IMG]

Not the image, inverted the selection. I mentioned it because, in images with only one object, it is usually easier to select the object and then invert the selection if you want to work on the background. You worked with layers, but that would be an option if you would work in only one layer, as you could apply the lens blurr only to the selected area (BG, in this case).

Anyway, you did a very good PP job. I believe this would work like a "case study" for many people, if we could see the "before/SOOC" image VS the PP'ed one. You certainly gave a good OOC image huge improvements here.

Well done.

Cheers,

[John 2]

I'm being a bit slow Otavio. Of course that is what you meant and you are quite right. In this case though I used Topaz Remask to cut out the car. The SOOC image is below. You an see what I mean about the BG. Not only messy but in white it is very distracting.

[Texas Dave]

So clean!

[Otavio]

I'm being a bit slow Otavio. Of course that is what you meant and you are quite right. In this case though I used Topaz Remask to cut out the car. The SOOC image is below. You an see what I mean about the BG. Not only messy but in white it is very distracting.

Thanks for sharing the SOOC image, John. As I suspected, your job is quite a great example of how PP can change (improve) an image!

Again, well done!