Architectural images that take a bit more work in Photoshop

Some architectural images take a bit more work. Occasionally as a professional architectural photographer it is necessary to dive into Photoshop to do painstaking hours of retouching.  Here is an example of one of those architectural images that requires just sitting down at the computer and digging in. Knowing the nuances of Photoshop helps. Here are some of those tricks. First a single exposure of the building right out of the camera.

1200 West Marshall UVA singe exposure out of camera

The after shot after fusing 5 exposures, cleaning up the wires and poles, adjusting color, cleaning up the pavement and replacing the sky.

1200 West Marshall after retouching

Telephone pole wires are easy but not easy. The look straight but they are not – they droop. With the spot healing brush set to just a bit wider than the diameter of the wire, if you click on an edge of a window or some type of hard edge and then click as far at you think the wire will be straight enough to be contained in that healing path, and click on a final spot that also has a clean edge, you can make lots of progress cleaning up wires – even wires that cross windows and other parts of the building. Invariably there will be spot runs like this that will not work and you just have to pull out the clone stamp tool and do your best to match the length of the wire. Telephone poles will need the clone stamp tool – they are too wide for the spot healing tool. The spot healing too works as a content aware tool so it is looking for information around it to replace the selected area. Unless your telephone pole is sitting right over a nice clean stretch of brick, none of the healing or content aware approaches will work. Replacing the sky in this image is not too tough because there are no trees poking up over the roof line. A clean roof line is easy to select and then drop in a new sky.