Very new modern building with very old treatment

[Jim A]

I took this photo with my cellphone last month at the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. We were cooped up for seven days isolating, during our “holiday”, because we had caught covid. The “Jewel Tower” as you can see is very modern indeed, but I tried various things including this treatment, which I quite like. What do you think please?

[Digital]

Jim, very interesting picture.


Bruce

[billtils]

I like the way it emphasizes the lines/edges of the panels.

[royent]

I'd like to see it in sepia.

[Manfred M]

This is definitely an unusual treatment; why the sepia look rather than traditional B&W?

A few thoughts for you:

1. The image looks rather flat (low contrast); I suspect that the black point and white points need some tweaking; and

2. Heavy negative vignette to the point is is quite noticeable. Do you really need that much?

[Jim A]

Thanks for the comments and feedback, everyone.

Also thanks for the tips, Manfred. Here I have moved the black point and the white point, which has improved things. The sepia is one of the options I tried using the options in the Nik Collection, Silver Efex Pro. I have looked at the settings with the idea of lessening what may be a vignette, but have not managed to figure it out. Nevertheless, I have used denoise on it, to lessen the seeming impact of this.

I additionally present one of my earlier B&W attempts.

[pschlute]

I prefer the earlier attempt, in fact I love it !

[MrB]

...I have looked at the settings with the idea of lessening what may be a vignette, but have not managed to figure it out...

One way to reduce the effect of the light vignette on the top of the building is, in the original image, to add a bit extra to the size of the frame at the top, fill it with sky (e.g. using content-aware fill), and then apply the Nik Silver Efex preset effect. How much to increase the frame size is a matter of trial and error, to get the light vignette to have less effect on the top of the building. The image can then be cropped down to its former aspect, if desired.

Philip

[DanK]

Jim,

Nice image and a very interesting treatment.

Re the negative vignette and the lack of contrast, I'm guessing that this is a good illustration of why I gave up Nik. I no longer have Nik on my computer, so I'm guessing. Most Nik filters are designed to obtain some overall effect, and it's often not even possible to figure out, let alone control, the various parts of their recipes. I'm guessing that in this case, the overall effect they are trying to create is to emulate an old, badly faded sepia print, which would have low contrast (I've restored a few, so I know) and sometimes negative vignetting.

The alternative is to create the effect step by step using a conventional editor, like Photoshop or On1. It's more time-consuming, but you keep control.

If you use photoshop, there are several different ways to do a sepia conversion. There is a nice explanation of four methods here, https://expertphotography.com/sepia-filter-photoshop/. At the end of the page, she has thumbnails of all four next to each other, so you can see how they differ. The principal difference is how much they tint the whites.

Dan