This view is from a small landing area next to a not-yet-opened park in Greenpoint called Transmitter Park. I like the unusual view of the NYC skyline, with the midtown skyscrapers to the right, an unusual long cluster of low slung apartment buildings in the middle, and finally the power plant in the left foreground. Then, you can also see the Freedom Tower in the distance, seemingly right behind the power plant. Among other things, this displays the bend in lower Manhattan and the curve of the East River around Houston Street.
I have been using Aperture as my photo management and first line editing tool for a while now, but I only recently took advantage of a simple yet elegant feature. You can have multiple instances of any editing control (often referred to as a “brick,” presumably because of their stacked rectangular shape) in a single image.
Here I implemented the black and white conversion control, and adjusted the Blue color slider to darken the sky a bit. My problem was that in doing so, I also darkened the water and I thought it was pretty ugly. So I added a second black and white conversion brick, which needed only a slight adjustment to make the water looked the way I wanted. Then I went back to the first brick and applied the command to paint it in, and manually added it to the area above the horizon. Finally, I thought the buildings on the horizon were rather flat so I called up a contrast brush and applied it to the skyline. The only other adjustment was to use Nik’s Viveza. For those of you not familiar with it, this plugin allows fairly fine-tuned adjustments to specific areas of an image using basic controls for brightness, saturation, contrast, structure, etc. I applied control points to the sky which simply brightened that part of the image. Because the background was nearly black, this only affected the clouds and set them off better from the sky itself.
For reference, the original image is below. I also show an iPhone shot of my gear from this spot. I think my camera was pointing a bit to the right, but otherwise this is how my setup looked for this shot.
Tobias George
12 Jul 2012Love the detail in the skyline! Nice one.
Scott Wood
12 Jul 2012Not only a very nice scene, but you really nailed that black and white conversion. I could look at this image for a very long time.
Mark Neal
13 Jul 2012Beautifully processed, Mark. I don’t know Aperture but your “bricks” sound like Photoshop layers. Anyway, you’ve done a great job on this image.
Mark
13 Jul 2012Hi Mark. Bricks aren’t really lares. Maybe “modules” would be a better term. Basically they refer to groupings of related controls. There’s one for exposure, brightness, etc., another for highlights and shadows, another for curves, one for levels, etc. There are no layers in Aperture, but combining the brick/modules with brushes, you can achieve many of the effects you could create using layers.