Anybody out there?

On working with the photograph as opposed to fighting it.

This image was a lesson in working with what I had rather than what I wished that I had.

It was shot at ISO 400 using a compact camera from a car doing 50 mph and looking straight at the sun. I liked the skyline though and wanted something of an end result.

I started out trying to recover detail in Lightroom but the results were getting more and more horrible by the tweak. There just wasn’t enough clean image to work with.

It wasn’t until I thought about the photograph and why it first appealed that the answer became obvious – I was going in the wrong direction entirely - I needed to lose information not salvage it.

So I used the noise filter and negative clarity to blur the image and contrast to lose detail and that was about it. This was enough to lose the nasty stuff, emphasize the skyline and turn the sky from a mottled mess with a pronounced GIF-like gradient into something much more pleasant.

The other thing that helped in this case was the title ‘Anybody out there?’ Usually I treat titles as being throwaway at best but on this occasion I think that it helps the image.