Importing Sky

I needed a picture for the front cover of the Hitcham and Taplow Society Newsletter. The theme of the issue had changed just before publication due to developments at the old paper mill site, so I had to find something relevant to that - and quickly. I walked around looking for suitable views and took pictures of the few parts of the site that are easily recognisable from outside. The picture of Glen Island House seemed to have most promise.

Cover pictures have particular requirements that are rather different from club competition images. In this case I needed a portrait-format picture that would fit onto A4, with a large uncluttered area at the top for the magazine title block (called the Masthead) and a smaller area at the bottom right for the web address. I wanted to put the same colour text in both areas, so the tone had to be similar.

The picture I had chosen fitted all the requirements except for the tone of the text areas. I started by trying to extract detail from the image itself, but it soon became clear that there was none to be had. It was clear that I was going to have to find a darker sky from another picture.

I made some small improvements to the base image: correcting the verticals and warming up the tones a little.

Looking through my other pictures I found a likely sky above Loch Rannoch. I copied a suitable section of it into a new layer in the Glen Island House file.

I set the layer mode to "Darken Only" so that it would replace the white sky without having too much effect elsewhere. The Curves tool allowed me to adjust the tone until it was dark enough to take white text. The picture was beginning to look rather good - provided nobody looked too closely!

The darken-only mode had done a good job on the bulk of the sky, but had messed up some of the foliage and parts of the building.

I added a layer mask to the "cloud" layer and rubbed out the bits that were causing most trouble. Other bits got cloned out or darkened on the base image. The result is not perfect, but the oddities are dark and in parts of the picture that the eye is not drawn to.

The only remaining problem is that the conical spire sticks out like a sore thumb. I took a copy of it onto a new layer and darkened it with the curves tool.

Here is the completed picture. It was actually done at a resolution of 2048x3072 which gives over 200 pixels-per-inch on A4, which is adequate for most magazines.

The text was added as an overlay in the page-layout program (Scribus) so it printed with the full resolution of the print process. You can see the final result and download the PDF that went to the printer from the Hitcham and Taplow Society website.

I did this with The Gimp but the same techniques would work with any image manipulation package that has layers.

-- AndrewFindlay - 05 Feb 2009

09 Feb 2009 12:36:50 JohnAshford:

The news in the Newsletter is not quite so nice, though, and I think people in Maidenhead should look at more of the Hitcham & Taplow web pages too, to see what is going on at a site of common interest.