6 hours to Photoshop a picture?

It's been some time since my last post. My day job plus blogging on Contest Junkie can sometimes be really tiring. Since my priority is on Contest Junkie, I will only blog on Dallas Eye when I have the time.

I've dissapeared for more than a week! So what have I been up to?


As some of your might know, Adobe recently released Photoshop CS5. As a big fan of photoshop, of course I would love to get my hands on it and try some of the new technologies.

To try out the features of Photoshop CS5, I've started working on a picture and see what CS5 can do, and how quickly. Over the week, I've spent about 6 hours to edit the following picture. It's all part of the plan of learning how to do layer masking. It's a very powerful tool where the user can alter parts of the picture without affecting the rest.

What has been done?
1) Used Content Aware to remove all distractions in the picture
2) Selected all the sky (including those caught in the tree brunches)
3) Created 2 layer mask (One for the sky, and another for the rest)
4) Created 3rd layer mask for the tent
5) Edited 3 photos seperately in Lightroom for each layer mask
6) Recombine and did various touch ups like colour balance, high pass, noise reduction, contrast/brightness, Hue/saturation.
7) Flatten image and sent to back to Lightroom for final processing.

And there! How I wasted 6 hours...

Camera settings:
Focal length: 17mm
F-stop: f/4
Exposure time: 1/1250
ISO:100
Exposure bias: -0.7 step
Handheld

Original photo:

Yeah... wasted 6 hours on what can be done in 30 mins...