Summer in Sweden

The story behind the picture

With some photo’s you know what you the outcome will be or what you want the outcome to be when you fire the shutter. When I saw this little boat house with the tall trees last summer in Sweden I thought I had visualised the picture I wanted in my mind. I intended it to be a timeless black and white image. But since the house was painted a nice yellow, the trees summer green and the sky blue it became much to dull for my liking. I always try to capture the essence of a place, and it just got lost in black and white.

Processing techniques

So, after seeing Black and White was not going to work, I converted the image back to colour mode and added 1/2 stop Exposure and decreased the Black Clipping a tiny amount just to get a bit more depth in the shadows. A great tool in Lightroom is the Clarity Adjustment. Use it carefully and you can enhance your photo’s considerable. In this case I used negative clarity to lose the overall sharpness of the image and get a little dreamy effect. If you look closely in the top of the trees you will see this effect good. If you did not know and noticed it you would likely have thought it the wind going through the trees. To get the timeless look that I had in mind I negatively adjusted the Vibrance.

The next step took quite some time. Carefully moving between the leaves, using several brush sizes, I hand painted the house in the yellow that comes close to the original colour. Because the vibrance adjustment the sky was turning into a very pale blue, not so good, by using the Blue Luminance shift this was easily resolved. Finally I added a Graduated Filter in the the sky to get a stronger blue.
Adjustments used: Exposure, Black Clipping, Clarity, Vibrance, Paintbrush, Luminance, Graduated Filter

I hope you enjoyed reading that. Let me know in the comments if you like it, or find it to much or to little for your flavour.