One-Four Challenge: May Week Two – The Lock

Here’s my May, week two edit for Robyn’s One-Four Challenge.

For this week’s edit I decided to use a really close crop, shifting the focus away from the lock itself to the looping connections of the hasp and staple. I then added a black and white gradient map and fiddled around with the settings until the shadows and highlights were at the levels I wanted. To finish it off I increased the contrast very slightly and brushed the sharpen tool lightly over the metal. All edits were done using Photoshop Elements 13.

Here’s the original and the week one edit:

Original image

Week one edit