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The Patio at Night
4 June 2020
The third in our series of curfew images, The Patio at Night is uninhabited but, we think, welcoming. In addition to the pairing of the comfortable chairs, the heightened colors invite you into the picture.
The Patio at Night. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 34mm (51mm equivalent) and f5.6, 0.5 second and ISO 6400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw and Nik Collection 3.
The color comes from Nik Collection 3's Color Efex plug-in. We used the Nik Collection Dfine plug-ing on the image to reduce noise before running it through the Super Punch recipe in Nik Collection's Color Efex Pro 4 plug-in:
The camera JPEG, which is the thumbnail created to accompany the Raw file, shows the capture was a little bright. We went down to 1/5 second (manipulating the EV setting in Aperture Priority mode) but we found that to be a bit too dark.
And here's a comparison of the camera JPEG rendering with the Nik Collection rendering.
You'll notice we straightened the camera image in Photoshop before processing it in Color Efex.
As you can see in the screen shot of the Super Punch recipe above, Color Efex added three filters: Bleach Bypass, Contrast Only and Pro Contrast.
We didn't worry about detail in the darkest parts of the image because it's a night shot in which no detail in the shadows would actually have been visible.
But we wanted warm, saturated color in the fence and the bricks and this got us there.