LightningPaul

Shot in Europa College Brugge, in Belgium. I posted a few days ago another image made in the same building.


TECH-INFO: one RAW file, converted to TIFF in DxO Optics Pro. Processed in Photoshop. First I enhanced contrasts and turned it into B/W to tone it again afterwards using the color balance tool and a warming filter. The background wall is made out of focus using Focal Point 2. This is done by making a mask to exclude the three pipes. In Focal Point I used planar focusing, so a vertical bar more at the right side of pipes is more in focus (so less blurry), the sides, especially at the left, are more blurred. Focal Point 2 renders really nicely out of focus areas. Many popular lenses can be chosen or you can set up your own parameters.

Focal Point 2 supports selections made in Photoshop (so only the selected areas are affected) and supports the use of smart objects/filters (handy to re-edit in Focal Point). Unfortunately, those two very handy features cannot be used simultaneously. I contacted their technical support and after several emails explaining the issue they claim it's a limitation of the Photoshop SDK. The same applies for brushes in Focal Point in combination with smart objects/filters.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention but I used a speedlight flash, which was held in my left hand.