Deciphering Korean, one photo – four edits, part I

Early April this year, we visited the cherry blossom festival in Jinhae, Korea. Tired from being in the crowds and from adoring thousands of trees, we decided to rest in a café before getting on the bus back to Busan. Coffee is very popular in Korea, and there are many coffee chains as well as many trendy little cafés with interiors that any hipster spot here in Berlin would be proud of. We chose one of those, and while Mr. Colors deciphered the menu, I took pictures.

I chose one of those pictures for the One Four Challenge, an event where everyone edits a picture of their choice in four different ways and publishes one of the results per week for the next four weeks. I am going to show you the original JPG from my camera in the last week.

The picture was taken with my Olympus OMD E-M10 and a 20mm prime lens at aperture F1.8, shutter speed 1/160 and ISO200. I worked on the RAW file in darktable, a free RAW editing software for Linux users. This is my result for the first week:

I cropped the image, desaturated it and decreased the exposure. I increased the amount of black in the image, and cranked up both contrast and highlights to emphasize the letters.