WINTER WILDLIFE WORKSHOP

January 5 -10, 2024

What’s wrong with this picture?

This is a highly realistic miniature village in Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswalds region of England. I bring my photo tour groups here because it’s such an unusual and photogenic ‘little’ village. It was built almost 100 years ago, and the aging process has only enhanced its realism. Photographing the small scaled structures has the effect of shooting from a drone, but in fact the houses are only about three feet tall.

The problem with this image is the fact that the sun was hitting the one house at the far left while the other areas of the frame were in shadow. I was struggling with harsh light all day, and in this instance the contrast worked against me.

In order to make this image look good, I used the quick selection tool in Photoshop to select the sun-lit house. I feathered the edge of the selection one pixel using Select > modify > feather, and then I opened up the levels dialog box with the pulldown menu command, Image > adjustments > levels. I moved the middle slider to the right which decreased the exposure significantly, but it also increased the color saturation to a gaudy red/yellow. This often happens when attempting to reduce exposure on a brightly lit subject, but there is an easy fix to deal with this.

The next step took care of the overly saturated sun-lit house facade. I chose Image > edit > hue/saturation and moved the saturation slider to the left to desaturate the color. This made that house the same tone as the others, and now that structure is not nearly as distracting as it was. §