Fuddland
Whenever I download my digital pictures from my camera, I usually crop them a little to make the subject more conspicuous, or perhaps increase the brightness if the photo is on the dark side; lately, though, I’ve been getting more used to tweaking the colours and other attributes to a much greater degree. There’s nothing very complicated going on, but a few small changes can make all the difference.
For example, in my recent Ireland photos, two pictures in particular were manipulated away from their original states into something I felt was more pleasing to the eye. Firstly, one of the solstice sunset images looked as though it had been washed over with too much orange, so I used Photoshop’s Curves tool to play down the reds and oranges and play up the blue tones, until I felt I’d struck a happy balance between sundown and blue sky. Here you can see the original image, a split-screen view of the orginal and the Photoshopped, and the final image.
The second image to which I made significant changes, I always knew I was going to alter; in other words, I took the photo with the intention of later messing with it in Photoshop. The original scene, of the leaves of a lupin with droplets of rainwater on them, was rather flat, and the other leaves just behind were distracting. So I carefully masked out the main leaves and applied some Gaussian blur to the remainder of the image, giving the effect that those parts were farther away and out of focus, drawing the attention to the intended subject. I toyed with making the greens more striking, but this made the pink petals look “wrong” — either too distracting or simply out of place — no matter what I tried, and in the end I decided a simple black & white image was quite effective. Once I’d stripped the colours out I altered the brightness and contrast until I found levels I was happy with.
Just recently I’ve discovered the joys of the clone stamp and how it can be used to remove certain elements from a picture, as in this photo of a street in Stamford.
Of course, it may be that you prefer the originals — it’s all a matter of taste. For more advanced, but still fairly simple, examples of how you can digitally alter photos, check out Dunstan’s great work.
