Rome, Italy.

The Tiber River partially separates the city of Rome from the city-nation, Vatican City. From the wall that rings this edge of Vatican City, you can see one of the bridges that allow travel between the two cities. The three-arch bridge in the photo was opened in 1911. Named after the King of Italy who reigned from 1861 to 1878, the bridge features four towers, each carrying bronze Winged Victory sculptures. The span is 350 feet (108 m) in length.

About the photo: Captured with my Samsung S20U, I was shooting directly into the sun which was just off the image on the top. When I first looked at the photo, I was afraid that the huge solar flair light leak would make the photo unusable. Luminar Neo came to the rescue. I opened the file directly in Neo and immediately went to work on the flare. If I couldn’t get that flare cleaned up, there wasn’t much hope for the image without a major crop.

I wasn’t expecting success with the erase tool and thought I might end up using Neo’s sky replacement feature. I decided to try the Erase tool anyway as it’s pretty efficient. The first couple of tries left duplications of clouds due to the cloning that the tool uses. A couple of undo and retries and some erasure of duplicate cloud effects cleaned up the sky pretty nicely.

I then went to Neo’s Develop module and raised the shadows to bring out more detail in the backlit bridge. I didn’t raise the control very much as it made the bridge “look funny”. Raising the shadows also created another issue. That tower directly under the solar flare didn’t look right as it was a bit hazy and the exposure didn’t match. I used a radial mask to put an oval around that tower and tweaked the exposure and dehaze inside the mask. The goal was to match the look of the tower on the right for exposure. All in all, I think the extra work was worth the processing time. You can view both of these images in 2K HD on my Flickr site. Just click on an image to check it out.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner