Istanbul | Istiklal Caddesi

This is among my favorite picture of Istiklal Caddesi in Istanbul, there are a lot of peoples here, you really can get lost in time here, watching people doing their business along the street or simply watching people just enjoy walking here. Definitely this is a must visit place for any traveler or tourist who come and visit Istanbul apart from most common tourist attraction like Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya at Sultanahmet. People here really doesn’t bother so much of you taking picture of them, maybe most people here are so accustomed with photographers taking their picture, after all, this is among the most popular tourist attraction in Taksim Turkey.

About the editing, I use a light texture to et a vintage kind of feel here. If you like to know a bit about my processing, here it goes, first I do my editing as usual, adjusting colors and contrast, then I choose “Blue Channel”, Red, Green and Blue Channel give different kind of monochromatic image, so in this case I like to use Blue Channel, copy that Channel and paste it on top of the layer, and start working from it.

Turn it into sepia image before adding texture. The original texture are a bit hard, I just want a lightly texture, so I play around with the opacity, I mean reduce a bit the opacity of the texture until satisfied. Here I use soft light blending mode, which is always my favorite blending option. So if you have the time, play around, give your picture some artistic touch into it. If you don’t like doing heavy editing, that was fine but for me I like to try new thing, I like my picture to have “feel” when people watch it.

I don’t called this editing as a “manipulation” but an “enhancement”, the story is still there, the people are real, I did not add or remove what’s being there or what’s not being there, well, maybe I add a “texture”, that’s it. Those thing does not in anyway change the content of the picture, the people, the activity and the surrounding, it’s just that with this kind of an “enhancement” you can “feel it”…