Taken last week while I was away for a family reunion. This is the "centerpiece" of some gorgeous woodworking inside a church. I won't go into much more back-story here, though.
I take a picture of the woodworking every time I go there, and this time I decided I wanted to put a new edge on it. I wanted something more striking, more complimentary to the design. Usually the lighting is very difficult to work with (as is the case in 99% of churches), so even if you calibrate it right, you generally end up with some glaringly ugly contrast issues or the "eggshell white" effect where every bit of white is a slightly different shade of white.
I must admit I got lucky on the lighting. It was just the right minute of the day where the natural lighting was best for that little church. I even forgot to switch to RAW mode. (I switched to JPEG only because I was worried about card space. Contrary to popular belief, I am a digital photographer who only has a 4GB card and a 2GB card. Most photographers carry at least one 16GB card, and usually several 8GB cards. Next time I have ~80 bucks on me to drop, I hope to reconcile that a little.)
Anyway. Post-processing was fun. I loved the slight tinge of aqua on the bottom-center of the image, so I dropped all color values other than aqua and green, and moved up their saturation values a bit. All that was left was getting the contrast and highlighting on the woodworking just right. Of course, in Lightroom, I was in love with a version of this photo that had considerably less contrast. It was a bit brighter because of that. I don't know, but everything always looks better in Lightroom. As soon as I export it to Photoshop so I can add my watermark, I think, "Oh. That's...flat." And I wind up boosting contrast levels. Oh well.
