... The firemen old car

S. Joao da Pesqueira

Loved to see this old Opel (Vauxhall for you the Brits) of 1961.
The rear was even more interesting.
This is a yesterdays's picture but I spent some good time today tuning and post-processing.

what I did.

There are two distinctive areas of strong light and strong shade. So the exposure was not right in both areas.

In Adobe Elements 12
1. Straightened the picture ( I tend to lean to the left)

2. Corrected the levels.

3. Used a layer to darken the whole picture (ignoring the changes in the car and shaded areas) until I got an exposure in the background showing correctly the detail and colour in the sunny areas (the sky was almost white and the stones in the palace were pale yellow).

4. Added another layer and bightned the whole picture just paying attention to the car. Till I got the car full of light and and showing more detail.

5. With the eraser deleted the last layer around the car to reveal the previous darkened background preserving the light in the car and in the pavement in front of it.

6. This way I got both areas (shade and sun) much better exposed and the picture is now more balanced and lot more pleasant.

7. Flattened all the layers and saved into .JPG.

Loaded the picture in Macphun Intensify for Mac (I'm loving it).

1. Applied the filters (in separate layers) "Detailed Image" at 5% and "Pro Quality" at 5% , to sharpen a bit the whole image without pixelating the image to much.

Original Picture Here