Portabello Busker

I was watching a video with David Nightingale (Chromasia) on how he started his blog earlier this week. Apparently he has somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 photos posted to his site. At some point he talks about trying to take a shot where he didn't get exactly what he wanted but using Photoshop to turn it into the best possible image he can. I went into this shot with that exact same thing in mind. The original and outtake after the jump...


The orginal was accidentally taken with a +3 florescent white balance and turned out heavily darkened blue. In addition it was shot almost wide open with auto focus so randomly the only thing in focus was the end of the guitar.(So many things wrong but hey it was shoot from the hip on the move so whatever)


Above is the first version that I came up with. It's got a few layers of contrast, curves and dodging with an additional layer of texture. I like what I had but thought the focus of the picture was the guy with the guitar but felt like the bass player actually had more emotion. In the end I added another layer of texture and used that to eliminate the guitar player.