Continuing from Part 1, I now had a single image that was very large in size and very good quality. At this point I decided on the final part of my first idea, which would be experimenting heavily with lighting. For this first mock idea I would create 3 different images from the one I had just created, representing different times of the day. These would be the following:
Lighting 1 - A typical bright sunny day.
This meant a clear blue sky without any clouds, few shadows, and generally a fairly bright and warm looking photo. Looking back this was most likely the easiest of the three, for the main reason that the photo was taken around midday, so the lighting was already fairly close to what I was aiming for.
To achieve this desired look, I first cleared up the clouds in the photo using a mixture of the Eraser and Healing Brush tools both set to very low softness. This was obviously because when dealing with clouds it looks more realistic if there is a soft edge.
After this I decided to work on the heavy shadows particularly on the brick wall and pathway as these were too dark for what I was aiming for. These were easily changed using the "Shadow/Highlight" tool and by adjusting the light levels. This made the photo a lot brighter and meant that much more detail was visible, particularly the bricks on each side of the railings.
Finally, I created several more layers and used these to increase the sun's brightness and contrast, for example, a yellow circle placed on top of the sun with the layer set to "Color Burn" created the impression that the surrounding leaves were being heavily lit by the sun's brightness. After applying this effect and many others to various buildings and other parts of the photo that needed extra lighting, I added a weak warming filter to the whole image which gave the photo the look I wanted. The final image has been scaled down a lot to fit the size of this page, and has lost a bit of quality as well. The original resolution image will be included on the CD when it is handed in though:
