Cellpic Sunday – Carnival Magic at Saint John

The Carnival Magic at Saint John New Brunswick.

Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

We stopped at Saint John on our Canadian cruise out of New York in September 2022. Our goal for our one-day visit was simply to walk around the city near the dock where the Carnival Magic tied down for the day.

The Saint John Cruise Port is one of the primary ports of call for cruise ships visiting the Bay of Fundy region. The port can accommodate large vessels and offers a range of facilities and services for cruise passengers. For cruisers who do not even wish to walk uptown, there is a container village featuring souvenir shops and other typical vendors of cruise products, tour companies, and even a lounge only open to cruise ship employees who want to spend some of their free time off the ship.

About the photo: Upon leaving the ship, we walked over to Water Street and I saw an opportunity to capture the Carnival Magic in a two-image panoramic photograph. The ship is home to about 1400 crew members who service the needs of around 3700 passengers, typically.

I brought the two images, bow and stern each 12,000 by 9,000 pixels, into Adobe Lightroom’s panoramic stitcher and then reduced the panorama’s size to 4096 pixels wide before I shipped the combined image off to Luminar Neo. Loading super large images into Neo for processing can take a very long time to do basic processing tasks that would be wasted on the resolution of a typical blog post.

The weather was mostly overcast and the sky really didn’t complement the image so I experimented with sky replacement. As we arrived early in the morning, I found a sky from Luminar’s collection that reflected the appropriate time of day for us to leave the ship. The dock is oriented mostly north and south so with the ship pointed in a northwesterly direction, the clouds would be lit from the left rear of the ship with the light stronger at the stern. The angle of the sun in the sky I chose didn’t match the orientation of the ship so I used the “flip” option in the sky replacement tool. That moved the angle of the sun toward the rear of the ship.

Carnival Magic at Saint John-2 — The original version before the sky replacement.

If you look at the original version, you can see that the eastern side of the taller section of the cruise terminal appears to be properly lit by the sun but the upper level of the tallest section appears to be a bit in the shade of a cloud. In the modified image, I used the brush mask to first raise the exposure to the upper section of that tall eastern wall to match the lower part of the wall. Then I masked the entire wall of that section and raised the exposure a bit more to emphasize the sunlit wall. Taking care of small details with shadows and sunlight angles when using sky replacement makes the final image realistic and believable. I used Neo’s Golden Hour slider to give the plants in the foreground a bit of early morning color. Were you able to tell immediately that something wasn’t quite right in the sky or the lighting? Which version of the image do you prefer? Let me know what you think in the comments. For a closer look at the images, click on either one above to view them on my Flickr site in 2K HD.

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