I’m glad that so many people found the recent “edgy” series of remixes interesting. As previously stated, it’s not for everyone. And some have tried it on some of their images with varying levels of success.
So tonight I found myself on a road trip, two hours ahead of my normal timezone and unable to sleep. What better time to work on some photos! So, going through some images from Italy that I happened to have on my laptop, I applied the edgy affect to the above photo I took of Lover’s Locks from a bridge in Bolzano, Italy.
First, about the picture: If you look closely at bridges in Italy, you will occasionally see groups of padlocks attached to the bridge rails. The story goes that couples in love will attach a padlock to the bridge and then throw away the key as a token of their love. We saw this in Bolzano as well as Florence. In the more noticeable spots you would find clusters of these padlocks on the bridge railing. We eventually started calling them Lover’s Locks (a term my wife and I used).
Now, about the effect: I applied the edgy technique within Lightroom to the original photo. I then played around with the Exposure, Blacks, and Brightness settings. The image still didn’t feel right to me. I wanted the padlocks to really pop out of the image. So I then adjusted the Saturation to only emphasis the brown color (using the WOW preset WOW-c_HSL-Only_Brown). This helped, but the color was too intense. The final adjustment was to reduce the saturation. Below is the original image along with the edgy version.
