Day 295

I woke up this morning with a raging sore throat, so I've stayed at home today rather than going on a photo walk. This is the first time I've been ill since Iain left, and I'm really surprised I've made it this long (11 weeks). Like a lot of people, I almost always fall ill straight after an emotional upset.

I decided to have another go at shooting smoke today. I attempted it a few months ago, but I wasn't pleased with the results. I'm happier with what I've managed to get today.

Here's the final image:

This is the original shot, straight out of the camera:

I cropped the image (a square crop worked best for this particular smoke pattern), and then I played around with the contrast slider, blacks slider and tone curve in Lightroom to get the background as dark as I could. I then inverted the image in Photoshop, to give dark smoke against a light background. Finally I brought the image back into Lightroom. I applied the 'purple glasses' preset and tweaked it until I got an effect I liked. Finally, I made the smoke as fluid-looking as possible by reducing the clarity and adding a fair amount of noise reduction.