564 - 'Frisco B & A

"B & A" is my slang for "Before And After". 

Source photograph courtesy of my friend Earl. 

My friend Earl dug up a photograph from the 1990's of San Francisco.  It's grainy, scratched, and lacks composition on account of Earl not bringing along a decent long lens for his camera.  Earl did not think this picture could be enhanced with Photoshop, so I took that as a challenge to try:

Alcatraz and San Francisco - the "After" pic.

I did what I could.  Perhaps Earl is partially correct that the image was a wash, but I feel that I was able to pick a few things up.

Early in the workflow, I decided that the aspect of the picture should be panoramic wide.  The source picture was both grainy and low-resolution, which meant that enlarging anything would result in big formless blobs.  So, a simple crop wouldn't do.  I decided to boost the resolution to 300 pixels per inch, and enlarge Alcatraz Island as well as move it to the right.  That way, I could also enlarge the city and make a decent crop. 

The city proved to be very obstinate, on account of many distracting artefacts caused by enlargement.  I decided to create a mask for the city which allowed me to keep its silhouette.  Inside this mask, I wiped out all of the grain and noise artefacts, leaving San Francisco looking flat.  I did the same thing for Alcatraz.  The result looks cartoony, but I was able to preserve the smoky colours I liked so much. 

I added some depth using colour and hand-painted lights to Nob Hill and the financial district.  After wrestling with the idea, I also decided to add lights to Alcatraz, despite the infamous prison having been decommissioned decades ago.  The lights make the island look less two-dimensional. 

Then, I needed to add the bridge.  It's been a very long time since I've been to San Francisco, so I only dimly recalled that the iconic Golden Gate should be to the right of Alcatraz from this view.  So then what is the bridge in the background left?  I looked it up on Google™ Maps.  I had to find a vantage from where Earl must have got Alcatraz, the city, and a bridge all in one shot.  I settled upon the vantage at Horseshoe Bay, which made logical sense.  Horseshoe Bay is the future site of the intergalactic headquarters for Star Trek's Federation Of Planets.  Earl, being a huge Trek fan, would gravitate there the way Martok gravitates to a 2309-vintage bloodwine (hint: the attraction is strong!).  A scan of the Google™ Street View showed a spot that must have been close to where Earl took his photograph.  I deduced that the bridge in Earl's shot was the Bay Bridge.  Fortunately, its simple silhouette was very easy to draw by hand. 

I used a lot of Gaussian Blur to make the scene fog-bound.  Gaussian proved to be a good choice, as it blurs much the same way that true fog blurs our vision in nature.  The blur also helped to remove the scratches that Earl's photo had endured over time.  Ironically, I used a noise filter to bring back some speckles to match the grain of the film that I chose not to blur out. 

Finally, I cropped the image to an aspect that I think looks good, and played with the image curves.  The curves belong to the colour graph of the image.  By adjusting the curves, I can create new colour components.  In this case, I brightened the image a little, which caused a pleasing glow to emerge from around the building skyline. 

I think this picture looks a lot better in high resolution, but Blogger does not easily show landscape-style aspects in anything better than screen resolution, which is low.  I was also tempted to bring this picture into my Painter program, but the challenge was to use only Photoshop.  Maybe I will tackle this image in Painter another day.