Playing with photoshop

[CyberCoyote]

When I was taking this shot I really, really wanted it to be more than it was. One of those almost memorable but not situations.

Then I remembered the trick where you put a gaussian blurred layer on top of the original for a little atmospheric look. I erased the bridge from the blurred layer to keep it sharp and parts of the tree trunks, too.

There's a way to give the blurred subjects a bit of a halo. If anyone knows how to pull it off let me know. Once I'd manipulated the image that much, though, I figured go all out and play. The end result is my wife's new desktop at work. (so she says, for all I know she had me forward it there to show folks and say, 'look at how my husband wastes his weekends!')


In the old days I'd have looked at that slide when it came back and tossed it in the garbage pile. Wasted film, wasted developing, and landfill. Now it's something I really like. Film was great, but so many times what you WANTED from the film you burned didn't come back to you, if you even remembered what you were trying to accomplish when the slides/photos came back. With digital we can shoot away like millionaires, never worrying about the high cost of our Velvia or whatnot, and seeing the results is instantanious. Then, if we're unhappy with the capture we can manipulate it to our hearts content without having to build a darkroom and invest in chemicals and various apparatus.

I guess I'm still in the giddy stage of getting into digital, sorry if it seems like a rant. But we really are lucky to have the tools available to us to practice our hobby.

[robar]

the second layer blur is something i use to highlight the subject.. it works well. look at my avatar and you'll see someone else that did image manipulation. he was a master at it. W. Eugene Smith was another. i think Smith was the greatest available lite photo journalist that ever lived.

roy