Okay, so this photo is a little bit of a cheat as far as belonging in the Photo Rework portfolio is concerned because the original photo that it’s a reworking of hasn’t actually been published at the time of making this post live. Also, this is the first photo in this rework series that I’ve based on a phone photo rather than using my proper camera. The sharpness and noise reduction isn’t anywhere close to what I’d normally photograph but I keep telling myself I need to concentrate more on the technique and content rather than quality and this is a chance for me to do so. It’s not as if I’m planning on printing this image on billboard posters.
Anyway, this is a photo of a couple of cocktails in the Skywalkers nightclub on the Star Princess cruise ship taken during one of the last couple of sea days on our March 2019 South and Central American cruise. The early evenings on Princess ships typically see one venue aboard reserved for cruisers who have amassed Platinum or Elite level loyalty with the line (that’s five cruises or fifteen cruises completed respectively) and during that time there are some free nibbles (breadsticks, meat, cheese, that sort of thing) as well as a selection of cocktails exclusive to the Elite Lounge guests and at a lower price than most cocktails aboard. We’ve cruised long enough with Princess to qualify as Platinum members now and have made use of the Elite lounge ever since because, particularly on Grand-class ships such as Star Princess, the venue has fabulous views to accompany the exclusive luxuries.
In terms of photo reworking here I wanted to make the blue cocktail in particular a lot punchier in the image so overlaid two layers on the original. The first was a low key processing to curve some of the darker mid-tones down even further; this was dropped in opacity until I liked the richness of the darker colours. The second layer was a fairly highly-sharpened and contrasted copy of the original that I added in Lighten mode with reduced opacity again to try to pick out some of the details in the cocktail glasses that had been lost. I wanted this to be a punchy processing I could upload to Instagram and not worry about the fine elements of masking areas. The final, simple change to the original image of the drinks was to add a blue photo filter layer to cool down the contrast between the drinks and the background and to subtly reinforce the cocktail colour even more.
