I cee u

I cee u, originally uploaded by liber.

Spiral staircases are one of those chiche’s that it is always fun to revisit.
Here is the original image:

There are a few things that can be improved, as highlighted below:

1) I would like to make the center pop, the corners are a distraction
2) Some elements in the frame like the orange chairs are attracting too much attention.

I’ll be processing this image with one of my fovourite raw processors, Capture One Pro. The new version (5) is a major improvement, introducing among others a dust removal tool that allows me to process images without going to photoshop, which was a major pain in previous versions and made start using both aperture and lightroom for a while, even though preferring the capture one conversions. What is still missing in capture one is image library management, so my images are staying in the lightroom library for the time being.

I will start by adjusting the exposure by increase it . To make the corners pop I will start by increasing the exposure and removing the darkest colors, done on the exposure tab of capture one:

I’ve also played with the levels; by removing the darkest bits (see bottom left) I’ve reduced color resolution on the darkest part of the image, therefore muddying the chairs to be less visible.

For the finishing touch I’ll use the lens correction tab to create a 2+ stop vignette, to achieve the tunnel effect. This combined with the increase in exposure achieves the intended result.

Now that the image is ready I’ll want to share it on flickr, for this I created an export recipe that converts the image to the sRGB color space and rund the standard flickr upload. To process press CMD-D on a mac, and all happens in the background while you go on to the next image.

Important in Capture one is to set an output folder I usually create a subfolder of the folder where the RAW files are for this: