The Horror Film Effect

Before:

The first thing was crop it square. It was shot landscape, but there was just extra nothing on the right side of the building, so cut it out to frame the building a little better. After that, converted to black & white using the Photoshop CS2 Channel Mixer with 25% green and 75% blue. Then levels adjustment by bringing the white point down to about 168 in order to brighten the building up a bit.

Created a layer mask at this point that separated the sky from the rest of the image so that could work on each one separately. So the first levels adjustment was just applied to the building. Then the same layer mask to apply a curves adjustment to the building. Adjusted the curve to a very harsh curve to really bring out the contrast in the brickwork. Then inverted the layer mask and applied it to a levels adjustment for the sky. Since there wasn’t much contrast in the sky to begin with, and to bring the black point up to 170 and the white point down to 222. Then applied a curves adjustment to the sky with another strong curve to boost the contrast.

Since the sky didn’t have a lot of contrast to begin with, my adjustments forced a lot of noise to become apparent in the sky. Then considered trying to fix it, but it adds to the mood so left it alone.

The last thing was add vignette to the photo to darken the corners and boost the mood. And of course, a bit of sharpening at the end and though this photo didn’t need much because of the already high contrast.

After :