Lazy 365, Day #3

The theme of my Lazy 365 challenge is this: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot.

H is for Highrise!

A slightly different view this time... I'm beginning to think I should just own the fact that I love these buildings that I drive past every day, and work my way toward a series of South Waterfront shots. Maybe something like Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Each day, both directions, the buildings are a different color. Since they are all so reflective, the colors of the sky (which are affected by the time of day and the weather) and the colors of the river (also affected by the weather and by the sky) play a huge part in the colors of the buildings.

Of course, I also like to play with those colors a bit once I get those shots onto my computer, but I'm not adding colors that aren't already there. If you look closely at the SOOC shot below (left), you can see the pink, purple, blue, and yellow sky colors reflected in the shorter building.

This shot was taken from inside my car, through a rain-drenched passenger side window, from the driver's side. You can see a couple of blurry spots that must be droplets of water on the window. Can't fix those, but I can do other stuff. What I did to this shot in Photoshop Elements 3:

1. Used the distort function to correct the perspective on the buildings just a little bit.
2. Adjusted the temperature, saturation, brightness, and contrast as a whole.
3. Adjusted the Red, Green, and Blue levels separately.
4. Boosted the saturation of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta separately.
5. Selected the sky and increased the blue in the midtones, and used smart blur on the sky.
6. Created a High Pass overlay to sharpen the outlines of the windows.
7. Darkened the brightest parts of the windows with the burn tool.
8. Very slight hue adjustments on individual colors in the saturation menu and with replace color.

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