Misty cows – Photoshop tone mapping

Sometimes you see a photograph that doesn’t quite work but you shoot it anyway and it is a good excuse to play around with it in Photoshop.

It was a foggy morning and the cows looked strange, atmospheric and otherworldly through the gloom. They were on the other side of the canal near Linlithgow.

Here is the original, “straight” out of camera. I shot it in “RAW” but these are at my personal default settings. FujiFilm S2 with Tamron 24-135 SP, Photoshop ACR 2.4

Of course it can be cleaned up a bit but is still lacks punch.

I probably should have cropped the top off it to provide a better “composition”, the sky is an empty nothing that doesn’t contribute much apart from its emptiness and nothingness. I had an idea in mind though, so it was kept in.

I know this will not be to everyone’s taste. I guess people will either like or loathe this. The effect is achieved using a technique called tone mapping, which I did with Photoshop CS2 although other software can do the same thing.

The result had lots of spots that made it look starry. Probably caused by “dust bunnies” on the sensor being revealed by the technique. A bit of Gaussian Blur in the sky smoothed it all out.

Moooo.