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A Slice Of Beach
31 August 2015
Last week we took a bike ride to our off-site storage location to drop off some DVDs. We made an adventure of it by coming back along the Great Highway. At the foot of Sloat Blvd. we stopped to taken in the surf at Ocean Beach.
We had the bright idea of taking a series of shots to turn into a panorama with the latest tools in Photoshop and Lightroom (which vary only slightly). But we blew it.
First, we picked too wide an angle on the zoom lens. When we stitched the images together we had, instead of a flat horizon, a very bumpy one.
Second, the ocean didn't hold its pose. Waves broke between shots. There was no way they were going to line up when we stitched the images together.
What were we thinking?
But the adventure wasn't a total loss because we took a few tourist snaps. In one of them a woman in red, chasing her dog, held onto her hat as she ran into our frame. Rather comic (but not at the time, as we recall).
It was a pretty colorless day to begin with. Gray sky. Gray ocean. Shadowless beach.
So we thought we'd grab this 16:9 slice of beach and turn it monochrome with an adjustment layer in Photoshop. That let us lighten the sky and darken the sand independently using the color sliders.
Then we just erased the woman in the monochrome adjustment layer to reveal her in color on the background image.
And we had our little laugh after all without getting our feet wet.