Abandoned stone house, County Kildare, Ireland

The Story Behind “Abandoned House”

I created this image using the multi-step approach I teach on my workshops, which I feel is crucial for any modern digital photographer: Camera/Composition/Post-Processing

1. I Identified the subject in the field (we were driving along a country road in Ireland, and the abandoned house caught our attention. We asked our driver to pull over so we could photograph it (this is the value of a private photo tour).
2. Although I originally captured the scene with my Nikon D850, I decided to use my Fujifilm X-T1 which was converted to capture infrared images.
3. The RAW file, when loaded into Lightroom, looks awful; the white balance is not easy to fix by default because often times the WB slider cannot handle infrared images.

   

4. By using a custom camera profile, I was able to easily fix the pink white balance problem. The only  major issue now is the power lines in this scene.

   

5. I then brought the image into Adobe Photoshop CC, where I quickly removed the power lines that went across the frame. Photoshop does a much better job at cloning than Lightroom.
6. I made some tonality adjustments to the highlights and midtones using Luminosity Masks.
7. Next, I added a couple of my royalty-free texture images in Photoshop Layers and adjusted the blending modes and layer opacity.

   

8. I brought the image back into Lightroom Classic CC, where I did the final dodging and burning steps and applied final sharpening.