Image Rescue
A busy urban scene requires a broad set of fixes
There ’s something about this little scene that grabbed the photographer’s attention – but the raw image isn’t really doing it justice, so a few
tweaks are necessary. Shot with a wide-angle lens, the first issue are those railings leaning out of the frame. In Lightroom’s Transform panel, I can play with the Vertical and Horizontal sliders to straighten the whole scene up before using Scale to make sure the image still fills the frame. This means I lose some of the original picture, but it’s worth it here.
In the Basics panel, I need to add Contrast and Clarity to give the photo a bit more bite. With an Adjustment Brush I’m also going to paint over the stack of abandoned tyres, then lighten them. Finally I need to enhance the colours – mainly the red and yellow – in the wall. In the HSL panel I can select the two colours individually, and first increase their saturation, then lighten them with the Luminance sliders.