Park Bench

Whenever I go on a shoot, I always go through pick my favorite shots, edit them and post them.  But them sometimes my second favorite shots get overlooked, especially because I lot of them may look boring straight out of camera.  So since I haven't shot anything new at all this week (soo bad!) I've still been going through shots from my Pasadena Huntington Library shoot looking for pictures that I may have overlooked because of their desperate need for editing!

So I came across this picture of a bench.  I thought it was kinda cool and that the composition was kinda unique but it definitely needed some desperate post production help! This is the shot straight out of camera:

First I rotated and cropped just SLIGHTLY to straighten it out a little bit. Then I ran Pioneer Woman's Boost Action twice, flattened, and ran MCP's Mini Fusion Action and adjusted the layers a bit. I also used to clone stamp tool to remove some of the yellow caution tape around the benches arm. Then I duplicated the layer and went to Filter-->Render-->Lighting Effects, changed the setting from spotlight to omni and centered the circle around the bench and made it much larger.  I hit ok then lowered the opacity of the layer to around 15%, which just makes it look like there's a bit of sunshine falling right on the bench.  This is what I got:

Much more interesting I think! Then for fun I ran Soulful's Everyday Vintage Action and added a little texture and got this.

So my lesson for the week is sometimes pictures you overlook, just need a little help!