Filter Fun & Dodge & Burn (Week 9)

The first two sets of photos are my dodge and burn photos. In the pictures of the rocks I highlighted the rocks and darkened the background, especially the man who was standing on the beach. In the pictures of the door I highlighted the white frame of the door, left the door to its original color, and darkened the window.

These are my filter pictures. For the landscape with the fence and seagull I used the color pencil and artistic strokes, which I set to go diagonally. In the picture of the beach chair I used water colors and used artistic strokes again. Then I hardened the edges and increased the number of strokes to make it look more like an actual water color.

Colors in Photoshop & Mosaic Art

I used photoshop this week instead of gimp and I have to say I am a much happier person because of it! This is what i did this week:

This is all the same picture, but I wanted it to seem as if I had taken a picture in the summer, early fall, and late fall. To get these effects I played with the hues and saturations. I then selected the part with just the leaves and colorized it.

For this picture (the original is on the left) I was never very happy with it but for some reason
I keep coming back to it. I thought it would be fun to play with in photoshop. I played with the brightness and contrast, adding a lot of brightness and a bit of contrast. Then I added a lot of saturation and played with the hue bar until I was happy with the colors.

The original is on the left. I really like this picture, and i think the flowers are beautiful, but I wanted to see what i could do with it. First, I played with the vibrant button, and made it ALOT more vibrant. Then, I upped the saturation almost as much as possible, which really brought out the great colors in the flowers. Then, I decided to play with the hues and saturation again (my favorite tab, I think) and I came to this color combination of blue and red, which I found really fun to look at. I don't like photos that are obviously manipulated, I liek natural looking ones. But I thought this was too cool to not post to my blog.

And here is my mosaic:

Photoshop Editing

Sorry that I'm posting this so late in the week, I haven't had access to a computer that I could download photoshop onto until today. In this first photo I edited out the wires in the top corner by using the clone tool and then I added in a boat from another picture that I had taken at the other end of the lake.

This next picture was a landscape of some mountains that I took. I cropped the picture and played with the colors so that the green and blues came out a bit more. I thought that by developing the colors and making the photo look "sunnier" the textures of the trees really came out, and it looks very soft.

Landscapes

This week I was on vacation in Rhode Island so I had to photograph scenery that I was not used to, which at first really uninspired me. I attended an art show on Sunday in Narragansett, though, and studied some of the photography for sale and realized that the scenery around me was actually very inspiring, I just had to stop focusing on the overly common ocean shots that I could capture and focus on taking shots that haven't been taken yet. I got a lot of shots, so I hope that you like them. I'm sorry that I'm posting so many but I had trouble deciding.

I'm not sure that I found out how to take the perfect landscape shot this week, but I know that I certainly learned how to take better landscape shots. One thing that I really focused on (which is probably obvious) is adding a sense of depth to my pictures. I hate flat landscape shots, and I did not want to be a photographer that takes those types of photos. I'm happy with what I took for photos this week, and look forward to even greater landscape shots in the future.