Lobby Light Globes - from start to finish

Our office is getting a new lobby.  Every day we watch the progress as the project progresses to completion.  Not only do we watch, but we walk through the area all day long.  It was on one of these walks that I snapped the image that resulted in today's post.

At first I thought to myself, "Should I just delete this image? It looks like a wasted shot."  After giving it some additional thought I began to feel the challenge.  Can I do anything to save this image?  Can I "save" it in any way?  By then I at least had to experiment and see what I could come up with.

This final image emerged from the process and the result, from such a plain start which was almost deleted, even surprised me.  I had to record the process to remember this one and remind myself that there can be potential in the most unlikely images......  Here is the final image.

Lobby Light Globes

So let me back up a bit to give you some perspective of where it all started.  Here is a shot for perspective.  You can see the light globes in the final image, they are hanging down from the ceiling over the red table.  I was walking by this very spot when my curiosity was peaked.

The setting

Then I leaned over the red table and noticed the reflection of the overhead lights.  

Moving in closer

The reflection in the table was what finally caught my eye.  I snapped this image below and went back to work.

  

The source image

Only later that evening did I look at the image above and start thinking, "This will never amount to anything.  I should just delete it."  But wait, I need to add some more images to my blog posting reservoir.  Time for some creative attempts.  

So I went to work.  First I imported the image into my Filterstorm app (my most used app that does most of the heavy lifting for my images).  The first thing I do is to crop the image to square.  That is just my own self-imposed criteria.  All my blog posts are in square format.  Once I zoomed in and cropped the globes to square, I then inverted the image so that the largest gloves were at the bottom instead of the top.  

Still the image of the globes looked like the above reflection in the table, just zoomed in and cropped.  Then the magic begins to happen.  I select my favorite filter in Filterstorm and open the Curves filter.  I love this filter.  I often play around with curves, inserting points on the curve and moving then all over the screen to seen what can happen.  For the final image of the globes, I used several curves layers and painted the effects I liked into the areas of the image I liked.  I darkened the background until it went black.  I painted another Curves layer in so that the reflections around the globes were removed.  I applied the Saturation filter to enhance the red color in the lights.  I applied the Noise filter to remove some of the tabletop fuzziness.  I then applied a little sharpening from the Sharpening filter.  

By now I was happy that I chose not to delete this image.  I really liked the effect.  Sometimes it amazes me what can happen with a little experimentation with many of the photo processing apps available for the iPhone and iPad.  

To complete the final image, I imported it to PhotoStudio and applied my favorite frame effect.  There you have it.......  The magical image that was hidden in the first photo just waiting to be released.....